


A Beautiful Dream

by die-forellex (heatinfreezing)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Violence, Dissociation, Dubious consent but not between Levi and Mikasa, F/M, Forced Prostitution, Gore, Human Trafficking, Romance, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-06-05 08:56:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 62,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15167147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heatinfreezing/pseuds/die-forellex
Summary: Sold as an exotic curiosity at the age of nine, Mikasa Ackerman had resigned herself to life as an accessory for the wealthy men of Mitras. But when an unexpected encounter reveals a glimmer of freedom, she seizes the opportunity. A dormant power within her awakened, Mikasa sets out for vengeance, refusing to let anyone stand in her way. That is, until she crosses paths with notorious man-for-hire Levi. Brought together by chance and bound by choice, the two learn to dream of a life unburdened by a legacy of pain. Together they imagine a future too beautiful to leave a fantasy — one they’re willing to pursue at any cost.





	1. Prologue

  


_art by[@winterofherdiscontent](https://www.winterofherdiscontent.tumblr.com)_

**.**

**.**

**Wall Maria, the forest outside Shiganshina District in the year 845**

The afternoon sun shines brilliantly in the clear late-spring sky. Birdsong floats on the air as Mikasa and Mother work behind the house, weeding in the garden.

Mother dutifully prevents any weeds from popping up, allowing only for neat rows of plants. Mikasa has learned how to pull the weeds down at their roots before they can grow too big. She doesn’t particularly like weeding the garden but enjoys spending the time with Mother.

“Do you remember Dr. Jaeger?” Mother asks as she shakes excess dirt off of a carrot.

“Is he the man who brought over the smelly bath powder?”

Mikasa tugs at the stem to pull a carrot from the dirt but struggles. Mother reaches over and places her hand over her daughter’s, helping her wiggle it free.

“You need to pull harder,” Mother says gently, placing the carrot in their half-full basket.

Mikasa looks down in acknowledgement. She always hesitates to pull vegetables too hard, afraid to break the stem off.

“And yes, you remember the oddest things, Mikasa,” Mother laughs.

Mikasa frowns. “Why is it strange to remember? We never have visitors, after all,” she says quietly.

Dr. Jaeger had worn round glasses, neat clothes and a trim beard. He was tall and slender, with a solemn face, but not an unkind one. He had prodded at her legs with gentle hands and declared she had growing pains. A rank mixture to put into her bath water was the prescribed remedy.

“What about Dr. Jaeger?” Mikasa asks.

Mother plucks a ripe strawberry from the bush.

“He’s going to bring over his son tomorrow, a boy around your age.”

Mikasa’s eyes widen.

“What for?!?”

Mother’s smile fades, her expression surprised. “Your father and I thought it would be nice for you to have a friend, someone your own age to talk to.”

“But…” she objects but stops short. She tries to think of way to express how she doesn’t want to meet the doctor’s son, doesn’t care to at all, but she remains silent, her hands fisted in her skirt.

“Come inside. It’s about to rain,” Mother says.

“How can you tell?”

There isn’t a single cloud in the sky. It’s the nicest weather they’ve had in weeks.

Mother smiles. “I always know. I have water in my spirit, it makes me wise.”

Mother always says things like this. Mikasa wonders what they mean but prefers not to contradict her.

“...and I can feel it in the ankle I broke when I was a young girl,” she adds lightly.

Mother stands up and leaves to go back inside, but Mikasa doesn’t follow, her attention drawn to movement on the strawberry bush.

“Come along, Mikasa,” Mother calls.

But Mikasa doesn’t hear, instead captivated by what she’s found: a silken web spun between two plants, its beautiful gossamer strands fanning out from the center. A small black spider works its way toward the center, where a fly is trapped.

Mikasa watches entranced as the spider spins web around a fly. The fly struggles, wings fluttering futility as the spider entombs its prey, tighter and tighter until it’s nothing more than a tiny, trembling ball.

“Mikasa!”

Mikasa shakes her head and quickly follows Mother inside, her thoughts trapped in the spider’s web.

.

.

Mother is right as always. The rain falls so hard that evening that Mikasa fears the house will collapse. Thunder booms in the distance and lightning flashes sporadically, illuminating the dark room.

“Wow, it’s a big storm tonight,” Father says as he gets ready for bed.

“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?” Mikasa asks.

Usually she sleeps in her own bed in the corner of the room, but her fear of the storm makes the twin mattress seem cold and unwelcoming.

“You’re getting to be a little old for that,” Father chides, but Mikasa can tell that he will be easily convinced.

“Please?”

Mother and Father share a look and sigh.

“Alright,” Mother says, patting the empty space in the bed beside her. Mikasa smiles and hops up, the frame creaking as she curls up under the blankets.

“I’m glad we have each other to keep warm,” Mikasa says after they’ve all settled into bed. She presses her cold feet up against Father’s leg.

“Brr, you’re freezing, Mikasa!” he laughs and and presses his own cold feet to her’s.

"Dad, stop that!" she giggles.

“Shh, be quiet you two,” Mother admonishes, though Mikasa can hear the smile in her voice despite the darkness of the room.

Mikasa wraps an arm around Mother and closes her eyes. She tries to sleep but in the quiet of the room can’t stop thinking about the doctor’s son, how she doesn’t want to meet anyone new, that she’s fine with things the way they are.

And what if he makes fun of her? She assumes he lives in a town, maybe even a city like the ones she’s read about in her books. He probably knows many things she doesn’t, he probably goes to a school with other kids and a teacher who isn’t his mother or father.

“Mom?” she whispers.

“What is it Mikasa?” she replies after a moment.

“I don’t want to see the Doctor’s son.”

“We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

“I don’t want to,” she insists.

Arguments between Mikasa and her parents are rare. She trusts that what they say is best, yet Mikasa is certain that this visit from the doctor’s son is a bad idea.

Mother sighs.

“Don’t worry about tomorrow, it isn’t real,” Mother runs a hand through her hair gently. “It’s an illusion. All that matters right now is now.”

Mother always says things like this that Mikasa finds confusing, even annoying. But before Mikasa can argue Mother pats her hair soothingly and Mikasa’s mind begins to quiet.

Raindrops plink on the cabin’s tin roof. The calming scent of lavender in Mother’s hair fills Mikasa’s nose and helps her mind to wander. On the edge of waking and dreaming she remembers the day that has passed.

Her thoughts turn to the fly in the web, and Mikasa wonders why she couldn’t look away as the spider trapped her prey. Why didn’t she help the fly? Why did she watch?

She thinks of Mother and how she always knows when it will rain, because of her spirit of water. As Mikasa falls asleep, she wonders to herself what kind of spirit she has. 

.

.

  
The rain continues to fall the next morning. Mikasa's head throbs but she tries to ignore it. Last night she dreamed, of what she doesn’t remember but it was unsettling, so she tries to ignore it. Father peels potatoes while Mother puts a salve on Mikasa’s brand, which is still healing. 

“This is healing very well, Mikasa. You did so well,” Mother finishes examining the wound on her arm and begins to wrap it up again. Mikasa feels warmed by her praise. The sting of the strange knife had caused Mikasa to yelp when Mother carved the symbol into her arm, but she had stoically borne the pain.

“Never forget, this is from our family,” Mother adds. “We’ve done this for generations. Someday, if you have children, you can pass it down to them!”

Mikasa plays with the bandage covering the scabby mark. The shape matches a mark on Mother’s arm. Mikasa feels proud to have things passed down to her from Mother’s family. Even if she never met them, the brand feels like a way she can know them.

“You always talk about children, but I have a question,” Mikasa says carefully. “How do you have children?”

“I think you should ask your father,” Mother says, her voice a little more high pitched than normal.

Father stops peeling the potato and his eyes widen.

“Hey, Dad,” she looks at him, his are eyes wide and cheeks a little red like he has a cold.

“That’s a good question,” he laughs, “I’m not quite sure, we should ask the Doctor when he gets here.”

Mikasa doesn’t understand why they’re both acting so strange, but her worry is completely replaced by the reminder that the Doctor and his son are coming to visit.

“Father, I don’t want to see the Doctor or the Doctor’s son!”

“Mikasa—” there’s a knock at the door that interrupts Father.

“That must be them. Mikasa, try to be kind,” he says sternly. But then his expression softens. “You’re such a kind girl,” he rests a hand on her head before he turns to answer the door.

Everything seems to happen slowly.

Father slumps to the ground, a cry caught in his throat as blood blooms from his chest.

A roughened, dark-haired man with an axe gripped tightly in his hands steps over Father’s twitching body.

“Pardon the intrusion,” he drones, his blood-spattered face twisted into a sneer.

Mother grabs the knife from the table, her knuckles whitened by her grip.

“Listen,” a second, taller man behind the first says, “just do as we say, unless you want to get your head split open.”

Mother screams at Mikasa to run away as she charges at the killer with her knife. They struggle with one another, Mother screaming as she brandishes the knife. The man curses.

“Dad,” Mikasa wimpers, her breathing fast and labored as she looks back to Mother.

The axe lands into Mother’s shoulder with a sickening thud that Mikasa feels in her heart as Mother collapses to her knees, blood spraying onto the floor as she gasps for air. Mother reaches for her.

“Run...Mikasa…”

But Mikasa is too stunned to move. Her feet have sprung roots, burrowed deep past the floor and into the earth below as she looks down upon her dead mother and father.

The killer grabs her shirt and lifts her by it. He tells her to behave, but her mind is far away.

The men tie her up and lay her on the ground. They bicker but it all sounds far, far away. Her body is stone and her spirit is gone.

They throw her into a carriage roughly and cover her with a blanket.

The road is bumpy. Rain beats on the outside of the carriage. The rope rubs her wrists raw and her brand bleeds through the bandages, but Mikasa doesn’t care. All she can see is her parents dead on the ground, their life bleeding out on the floor of their home.

She thinks of the fly, a shroud of silk consuming it as it had struggled to escape. She is like the fly now, her own shroud the blanket covering her as she waits to be consumed by the spider.

No, she thinks, perhaps she is worse than the lowly fly.

At least the fly had struggled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, welcome to my new story. It starts a little slow because we need to rehash a canon event, but I hope you'll all stick around for what I have planned. We will see Levi next chapter! The story is completed but undergoing some editing along the way. Updates should be weekly on Thursdays. You can also find updates [here](http://www.die-forellex.tumblr.com) on my tumblr. Special thanks to [@monachusmonachus](http://monachusmonachus.tumblr.com/) for all of her help betaing this story.


	2. Chapter 2

**Wall Sina, the City of Mitras in the year 855**

A full moon shines brightly overhead, the air hot and sticky with the sleepy feeling of summer’s end.

It’s a crap evening for a job. There’s far too little activity in the streets. The King’s birthday celebration had dragged on over the last fortnight, and for once the residents of the inner walls were mostly tucked away before midnight. Right when he actually wanted their help.

He’d much prefer rain, a large festival, a religious holiday — something, anything he could disappear into. But Levi has put off this job off too long already. It had taken him over a month to figure out when Gregor Royce would be back in Mitras, and Levi’s client was starting to lose his patience.

The owner of three iceburst stone mines near Shiganshina, Gregor’s business had taken a hit since the breach of Wall Maria, keeping him away from the interior while he cleaned up the damage. Not that this inspired any pity in Levi — the other six mines in Krolva District were humming along just fine.

Levi isn’t sure why he’s been tasked to kill Gregor, but these details don’t weigh on him. Anyone who amasses this much wealth does so through less than just means. So while this evening is not ideal, tonight is the night Gregor Royce will die.

Levi cracks his neck, stiffened by the uncomfortable perch he’s assumed on a neighboring rooftop. Three hours have passed since Gregor came home.

Like most men who can afford to structure their days as they wish, Gregor is a man of habit, for the most part. He eats dinner with his wife and daughter just after sundown, then goes up to his study to read while he drinks a glass of scotch. When he’s finished that, he goes up to the third floor bathroom to take an evening soak in a tub, after which he retires to the master bedroom, where his wife is already asleep.

This routine hasn’t changed in the two weeks since Gregor returned from surveying his mines. Humans are creatures of habit, Levi thinks, and unless Gregor is somehow aware of his imminent demise, this evening should be no different.

_Rain would be much better._

Levi had waited for some cooperative event to come to his aid all week, but this is the last night that Royce will be home before he returns to his mines for over a month, and the client wants the job done before then. The window for collecting payment is closing—fast.

_Still couldn’t get any fucking fog? Mist? Anything?_

Levi holds back a sigh. No use in bitching about it now. He treads lightly on the rooftop until he reaches a chimney, his thin leather shoes dampening the sounds of his movements. He peers around the corner into the bathroom window, where Royce is enjoying his regular evening soak.

_This is my last chance before I have to kill the wife, too._

Levi takes a deep breath of night air and closes his eyes for a moment. It has to be quiet. It has to be quick. It has to be now.

He makes sure no one is walking below in the alleyway before he jumps over to Gregor’s roof, landing as quietly as he can.

He reaches into his pocket for some rendered fat and greases the window hinge. The fat melts in the summer heat as Levi peers inside the bathroom. The tub faces away from the window, his one stroke of luck for the evening.

Levi slips through the window. With the entry done, it’s quick. Levi lets his focus narrow to Gregor Royce and Gregor Royce alone, his existence nothing more than his target for this small moment. He feels more than he thinks, putting action to impulse as his body moves of its own accord.

Levi can see Royce’s fat face in the mirror across the tub, his many chins concealing his thick neck as he hums to himself unsuspectingly. Levi approaches from an angle, skirting the mirror. By the time Royce notices him, it’s too late, Levi’s hands quick and forceful as he snaps his neck with a sick  _pop_. The bath water splashes onto the floor and Royce’s limbs flail reflexively, still twitching even after Levi’s sure the slob is dead.

Even after many times, Levi still feels a chill after a kill. It leaves him with a sick combination of power and control that warms him from within, tinged by a bitter edge of sadness that reminds him there’s still a small part of him that’s not shit.

Levi is thankful he hadn’t needed to use a knife. Slitting throats is messy business. Years of experience had taught him how to avoid the arterial spray of blood, but the spectacle still irks him.

Levi moves with care, fighting the urge to flee as quickly as possible. Slipper-padded footsteps pass the bathroom door as he slides out the window the way he came.

Standing on the rooftop, Levi surveys his escape route. Green rooftop is the one before the entrance, he notes. He leaps to the adjacent building, taking the most direct path he can to the rusted copper roof in the distance. The buildings begin to crowd one another and fall into greater states of disrepair as the entrance to the Underground nears. Nestled among the cracking buildings and littered streets is a modest staircase carved of foot-weathered stone that always looks wet no matter how long has passed since the last rainstorm. The steps descend so far that he can’t see where they end, the light of the torches on the wall fading away as the passage curves.

Levi steals as much fresh air as much as he can before he slips unseen below the surface. Few members of the underclass flow between the worlds above and below at this time of night, and aside from a few squatters wrapped in tattered blanks he passes into the underground undisturbed. One toothless man raises a yellowed hand to Levi, a request for money on his lips, but upon recognizing the assassin he averts his gaze and resumes nervously picking at his fingernails.

Although Levi was born into this world, he has never gotten used to the smell. The unique combination of piss, stale air and desperation is too stifling to forget. He wishes he had hidden maneuvering gear somewhere nearby so he wouldn’t need to walk home on the main streets, but the risk of a street urchin stealing or sabotaging such rare equipment outweighed the convenience.

The streets of the Underground teem with life despite the late hour. The buildings, cheaply and haphazardly constructed, tilt considerably compared with their counterparts above ground. The only well-maintained structures are the police lookouts. Thick columns of rock reach up so high that Levi can’t see where they meet the ceiling in the darkness, shaping neighborhoods and alleyways into random patterns that make little sense to outsiders. Even the police with their maps and patrols are easy to throw and confuse if you were born here.

Levi shoves his hands in his pockets, the yellow gas lamps dim, his eyes straining until they adjust to the dark light below ground.

.

.

A gang of orphans yell and shove one another as they chase a mud-stained ball down the street. Coats far too large for their malnourished bodies drape their bony frames.

_Probably a pack of mules._

Kids make great drug runners. They can distribute product easily above ground under the guise of innocence. And they’re impressionable. Gaining their loyalty is child’s play and requires minimal capital: somewhere dry to sleep and a meal a day is enough to gain undying devotion from someone who otherwise has nothing.

“Oi, that’s Levi, ain’t it?” one squawks.

“Haven’t seen him around in a bit.”

May be time to show my face more, Levi notes. It’s not good to be noticed suddenly and best to avoid creating noticeable routines.

Levi sees a pair of adults dressed in coats emblazoned with that gaudy unicorn on the breast. One is a blonde slip of a girl who is probably still wearing her first-issued uniform, the other a grizzled older man with black hair and an obnoxious mustache. Levi doesn’t know the girl, but the man he remembers. He remembers that man well.

The girl stumbles over her feet when he glares at her. She tries to recover with some semblance of pride, but when the man recognizes Levi he grabs her arm and abruptly changes their course through an adjacent alley.

Levi walks quickly to his house. He’s tired and hungry, and has no desire to linger or get roped into a conversation with someone. The buildings aren’t as tall in his neighborhood and the nearest police tower is relatively far away. It is a luxury that has become a necessity for his comings and goings.

Levi unlocks the three separate locks on his door. The modest warmth of home grants him a small feeling of comfort as he walks inside. The peeling wallpaper and threadbare stolen rugs, no matter how shitty, still inspire pride in him. Having anything to call your own is notable down here, especially when you come from nothing.

He wastes entirely too much potable water cleaning himself. The showers aren’t running at this time of night and like hell if he’s locking the house back up to go to the pump.

_I’ll get more drinking water when this client ponies up._

It should be a good payday: high-profile client on a strict timeline always merits a large fee.

Even after a relatively clean kill, Levi still dislikes the way death feels on his body. Hell, he doesn’t like how the streets make him feel. He scrubs with a bristle brush beneath his fingernails and uses plain soap made of ash and lye to scrub his legs and body.

_Fucking disgusting stench. Should’ve nabbed some of Gregor’s fancy soap on the way out so I’d smell like a fucking flower. Better than piss and shit._

He grits his teeth and scrubs until his skin is flushed a rosy pink before he rinses himself off and dries with a towel. After he dresses himself, he tosses the water out the back, then prepares a simple meal of bread and broth.

Levi rinses his dish and scrapes every last crumb of bread into his hand, then throws them into the rubbish bin he empties daily to avoid attracting vermin. After he has finished his nightly cleaning, fatigue catches up with him. He turns toward his bedroom for a few fitful hours of rest.

On the table next to his bed Levi keeps a heavy iron box with a lock. He spins the combination and opens it. Aside from a few items he has stolen that are somewhat valuable and records from past jobs, his sole possession consists of a brass ring too small for any of his fingers.

He’s had it ever since he can remember, so he assumes it once belonged to his mother. Even if he’s just made this fact up out of some sort of pathetic need for comfort, he doesn’t care. He takes the ring out of the box and lies on his bed.

_That pube-faced prick of an MP should be dead._

Levi spins the brass ring idly on his little finger and lets his mind wander. It’s been a little over three years since that night filled with the only blood he hasn’t been able to wash from his hands.

He struggles to even remember what the job was. The task was of such little consequence, but at the time he had cared far more about appearance and notoriety than he should have.

Levi remembers how his body had moved on instinct, how he hadn’t even thought as he dodged.

Isabel and Farlan hadn’t stood a chance. The bullets had split their foreheads too fast for either of them to realize they had barged into a meeting of crooked cops. Levi doesn’t know what they were discussing. Maybe they had been selling confiscated drugs, maybe they were pocketing taxes, but it doesn’t matter either way.

The only solace Levi had found was that he had hunted down every last one of those filthy sacks of shit there that night. Except the old MP he’d seen tonight. Levi needed a witness to his vengeance, a preacher to spread his gospel: don’t cross me. Spattered in filthy pig’s blood and a knife held to the MP’s throat, Levi had made sure the fucker had understood his role while his shaking legs turned yellow with piss.

That all comes clean, easy to wash away with soap and rags, a distant thought and a distasteful memory.

But Isabel and Farlan’s blood on his hands is a sin he’ll never be able to wash away. Levi has given up trying. He deserves this guilt, he thinks to himself, deserves to sit here alone with nothing but the brass ring of a mother he likely made up.

It’s for the best, Levi thinks. If you’re alone, there’s no one to lose and no one to let you down.


	3. Chapter 3

**Wall Sina, Fritz Arms Inn, the City of Mitras in the year 855**

Mikasa’s client is running late again.

She glances over at the clock by the bedside, hoping that the hand had advanced further than the measly inch from when she’d last checked.

If he were two hours late, she could maybe leave, reasonably assuming some business or family matter had prevented him from sneaking away. But thirty minutes wasn’t much, given he had to walk to the hotel where they meet. It’s also not like she really has anything else she could be doing right now; a whore’s schedule is never really her own, anyway.

Mikasa looks down at her notecard and reads it again. She has it memorized by now but she checks it all the same because leaving a customer dissatisfied earns a beating with a switch. Always light enough not leave permanent injury but sharp enough to sting for hours.

Dietrich Hildebrand. Inventor. Interested in steam engines, boats, and river travel. Family man. Connections with the royals. Likes the scent of jasmine. Demands pillow talk after.

She slips the notecard under a pillow and lies back against the oak headboard. Her corset tugs at her ribs and she lets her mind wander to a time where her only clothes were a few loosely fitting dresses and the wool pajamas her mother had knitted her for the winter. Clothes for comfort and warmth, not seduction and cold lust.

A hurried knock raps the door, and Mikasa gasps. A tall man walks in with a lecherous grin across his face.

“Did I startle you, Jade?” Hildebrand asks. “You’re always so jumpy when we haven’t seen each other in a while.”

“Oh, just a bit,” Mikasa demures, “I was worried someone else was there. I’m so glad it was you.”

A lie, like the name. But a necessary one to keep her client happy. Mikasa thinks it’s strange how men often come to a whore expecting a virgin but she can tell from the way he smiles that he’s pleased at this.

Over the years it’s become easy. Hands here, mouth there, bend this way. She doesn’t need to think, doesn’t even need to feel as she leaves her body, his hands on her pushing her spirit out of her until she’s somewhere different. Somewhere she isn’t a whore owned by another, somewhere she has choices and freedom.

When he’s done she can’t help but roll away from him because she knows if she looks at him now she’ll burst into tears, and no one likes a crying whore. This feeling ebbs and flows but is always the worst immediately after with the impression of a man’s hands on her body still so fresh.

Sometimes she feels like she leaves herself, exchanging this world of shame for a different place deep inside her mind. Maybe it’s a different time, somewhere where she had fought, a world where she wasn’t worse than the lowly fly struggling to escape. A world where she hadn’t been too afraid to meet the Doctor’s son. Maybe they played with a ball and stick in the streets or had secret jokes to tell one another. Their mothers would chat while folding laundry, their fathers discussing mundane things like the price of wheat.

Dietrich touches her hair, weaving his fingers through it all the way down to where it ends below her shoulder blades and her fantasy shatters, her mind snapped back to reality.

“You’re so beautiful Jade, unlike any woman I’ve ever seen before.”

Mikasa smiles saccharine sweet and kisses him on the cheek lightly.

“Thank you.”

She really is unlike anyone he’s ever seen before. Her mother used to say that their people were that of mythical creatures, great lizards that breathed fire and birds that rose from ashes into the sky with plumes of flame for tails.

Mikasa feels none of this inside of her. Perhaps her wings have been clipped, perhaps she doesn’t have any fire in her spirit, though Mikasa is certain she’s not made of water like mother was. Water was wise, water was adaptable. Mikasa is sure that if anything she is stone, cursed to weather everything until finally fading away.

He kisses her again, his mouth awkward and loathsome up against hers despite her permittance. She almost hates how gentle he is more than anything else, like he’s good to her for buying her, like he’s different than any man who would pay to own her for an evening. She covertly checks the clock on the wall and bites back a sigh of relief.

“I think our time is up,” she says feigning sadness. He sighs dramatically and she can tell that he is distressed.

“You’re my favorite to spend time with,” she lies, taking his hand in hers and kissing his knuckles, “if you pay in advance Mr. Bauer will give you a deal.”

This was the wrong thing to say. At the mention of her pimp Dietrich’s formerly serene, lovestruck expression twists into an angry snarl. His hand balls into a fist.

“Don’t speak of such things,” he reprimands, his voice slightly sharp at the reminder that she’s only with him because of the money he pays Mr. Bauer.  

She bites the inside of her cheek and takes a deep breath, doing the best she can to disguise her fear. It wouldn’t be the first time a client struck her.

“I just want to see you again, that’s all.”

This works and he calms, his anger dispelled by the fantasy she creates for him. 

His fantasy is her reality. In many ways it’s comforting to see this aggression from him. It reminds Mikasa that even a man with a gentle touch still pays to exert control over her.  

“Of course you do,” he croons, pressing another sloppy kiss to her mouth. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He dresses slowly, taking lingering looks at her that make a specific kind of disgust swell up inside of her. He kisses her one last time before he takes his leave.

Mikasa lets out a shaky breath and feels tears she didn’t know she was holding back roll down her cheeks. She wipes them away stubbornly with the heel of her hand, not caring if she smears her makeup.

She puts on her clothes: a simple blouse with a cinched waist and a long skirt with a slightly frayed hemline. The outfit is not nearly as nice as what Dietrich had seen her in; the silken finery she wears to meet with clients is far too flashy for the walk home.

The moon hangs heavily in the late evening sky, the pavement wet with rain as she walks back to the bordello. She reaches the stairs Underground. They descend so far into darkness that she can’t see the end of them. She habitually takes a breath of fresh air before she goes down.

Memories of  fine linens and scented oils fade as the squalor of the Underground City fills her nostrils, the dank air so thick it sits on her skin.

Mikasa hears someone whistle at her. She looks over her shoulder at a group of young men smoking cigarettes on the corner.

“You look lonely, why don’t you let me keep you company,” one of them leers.

He’s cocky as he saunters near her, but before he can get close one of his friends grabs him by the elbow and pulls him back, a nervous expression on his face.

“Oi, not her. That’s one of Bauer’s girls.”

The young man’s face pales as he backs away, Bauer’s name enough to dispel whatever confidence he’d had.

Mikasa takes the winding path back to the bordello. People give her a wide berth when they realize who she is. She’s used to being something of a feature down here.

“That’s the window woman!” a child says too loudly before his mother quiets him, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

_I’ve been called worse._

The bordello is well lit and clean. Mr. Bauer insists that his whores are the good kind, clean ones that won’t give anyone an illness because he keeps the quarters relatively nice and free of vermin. Fiona, a little girl sold by her parents to the bordello to settle a debt, cleans all day the way Mikasa did when she was first brought here.

Even in spite of the mice that live that in the walls, Mikasa knows her living conditions are better than many. She also begrudgingly accepts that her wages are largely what keep everything this way, that by virtue of her foreign appearance she commands a large sum of money that she’s never been privy to knowing.

Mikasa finds her room clean, her modest pallet made and her makeup brushes laid out neatly on a wobbly vanity. She strikes a match on the bottom of her shoe and lights a cheap candle, watching the small flame dance in the drafty window sill as she sits.

She often looks out the window out into the vast pit of the Underground City. If she allows herself she can sense the desperation of those around her, the mother struggling to feed her children, the gang of orphans who hunt down rats for dinner and the sickly, skeletal beings that live on to get their next fix of whatever drug the evening can provide. It’s too much to dwell on, so Mikasa closes herself off to it as she lets herself exist quietly in her mind.

She thinks about the Doctor’s son the way she has almost every evening for the last decade, imagines what he may have looked like. Perhaps brown hair and brown eyes like his father for tonight, but no beard. She imagines talking with him, enjoying his company while she does chores. Perhaps she is his wife, perhaps they are simply friends. Not that it matters. It’s mundane. There is sunshine, there is fresh water, there is food that doesn’t taste like ash.

She loses herself in this fantasy until the candle burns itself out. The Doctor’s Son is her secret. He is her salvation. Though perhaps most of all, he is her shame.

.

.

Mikasa paints her face with care for the evening: red lips, pink cheeks and black to line the tops of her eyelids.

“Alfonse Schuler” reads her card for the evening. She’s never had his patronage, but his list of preferences explain that he has admired her from afar for some time. Mikasa is to be his companion at a party celebrating a successful service his company provided to King Fritz.

There’s a soft knock on the door. Mikasa finishes her makeup before she gets up and answers it.

Fiona steps into the room, holding an extravagant, beaded cobalt dress. The dress is objectively beautiful, with pearls and crystals stitched into the waist. Soft blue-grey silk and grey lace applique line the skirt. The neckline creates a ‘V’ with the same grey lace framing the bust.

“Mista Bauer came by with this for you ‘ta wear tonight. I’m supposed ‘ta help you get dressed.”

Mikasa takes the gown from Fiona and steps aside so she can come in.

The material is fine on her skin and she’s certain that this outfit was purchased specifically for her by this evening’s patron. The extravagance of it indicates that he’s far more connected than she would’ve guessed.

Fiona buttons the last button on the back and sighs wistfully.

“I can’t wait ‘ta wear pretty dresses like you.”

Fiona is a dumb girl. She’s twelve, soon to be thirteen, and still doesn’t seem to understand exactly why she is here and what the job of a whore is. Mikasa knows that sooner rather than later she’ll be sent up to another girl’s room to learn the way things are.

Mikasa still remembers when she’d woke up with blood on her sheets and been told she was a woman. Even as a thirteen-year-old girl she had known what that meant. She’d immediately been sent up to Gina’s room for lessons on how to please a man, what to expect and how to give them their money’s worth.

Mikasa took her first client two weeks later.

“Make sure my thistle root tea is here when I get back,” she says cooly.

Mikasa doesn’t bother telling Fiona that pretty dresses come at a great cost.

Fiona nods, her eyes still alight with the excitement of finery before she leaves.

Mikasa puts on an ugly coat and tucks the skirt into her thigh-garters—she wouldn’t want the filth from the street to ruin such a dress.

There’s a carriage waiting for her above ground to take her to the party. She takes off her ugly black coat and sets it aside. The driver will return it.

She glances out the window and realizes this is farther into the interior than she’s ever been. The streets hum with music and laughter as people drink and dance. Mikasa then remembers that the King’s birthday is next week, which above ground merits a week of celebration and merrymaking.

Her stomach turns, an odd sense of dread tightening as they go further into the interior.

_We’re going to end up at the palace if we keep going._

The carriage continues, her throat tightening when she realizes that the palace is exactly where they are headed.

Mikasa knows she is more than a common whore, that her appearance affords her a certain type of client, but this is more than she ever would have anticipated. For the first time in years she feels nervous.

Alfonse Schuler is stout with red cheeks and pockmarked skin. His salt-and-pepper hair is slicked back to hide a bald spot and the buttons of his jacket strain around his waist.

“Hello, Jade. You look ravishing this evening.”

His voice is almost a sneer, his lips curling upward to reveal his too-large teeth. The way he speaks makes Mikasa’s skin crawl, makes her feel dirtier than usual. She already feels as if she will be ill.

“Mr. Schuler,” Mikasa glances away demurely and blushes as he takes her hand all the same.  

There are plenty of whores in the Underground City, and the skilled or particularly beautiful ones are brought up to the surface for festive occasions. Mikasa has been to many such events — parties, concerts, even sporting events — but in her years as a whore Mikasa is sure she has never witnessed such decadence.

Servants carry platters of food and drink to each and every guest, a quartet of musicians plays music that seems to ring its way into her ears. The ceiling is high and lit by a chandelier of crystal. She can’t even count how many candles hang there, shining rainbow light through the crystals across the room. Mikasa wonders how long it took to light each candle and how expensive it would be to let so many burn all at one time.

A servant dressed in velvet more extravagant than anything Mikasa has ever worn offers her a fine crystal glass with honey-colored liquid that seems to bubble. Mikasa takes the drink to hold but smells it first. She can tell that it contains alcohol, so despite her nerves she doesn’t sip it; she doesn’t want to ruin her lip-paint or lose her sensibilities. This is a common mistake she’d made in her earlier years and she knows she can’t afford any mistakes this evening.

People ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at Mikasa’s appearance. She hears the usual comments and Alfonse’s chest puffs out proudly, his cheeks happily flushed with pride at the exotic whore he’s managed to rent for the evening.

Everywhere around her there are people. Fine, beautiful, happy seeming people with cheeks flushed and smiles that reach their eyes, a fine illusion crafted from wealth that may as well be their reality this far in the interior. Mikasa knows better than to believe this. She knows that the world is terribly cruel, that even fine silks and laughter cannot change this.

Mikasa doesn’t speak as Alfonse makes his rounds of showing her off to his social peers — she knows her position is to be an ornament, so she merely nods and smiles and even attempts to look fondly upon the red-faced, increasingly drunk Alfonse.

“I’ve one more acquaintance to introduce you to, then we can,” he pauses to look her up and down, his eyes lingering on every part of her with want that makes her skin crawl, “go somewhere private.”

His hand tightens on her waist and she lets him pull her close and reminds herself that the revulsion she feels is no more than what she deserves for her cowardice.

“That sounds like a plan,” she whispers to him the way she knows men like.

They leave the main hall filled with dancing nobles and beautiful laughter and go down a hallway with noble portraits of kings framed in heavy gold leaf.

Alfonse makes a show of opening the door for her, revealing a small sitting room. The room is hazy and blue with smoke, the smell of sulfur matches fresh on the air. A man turns around and perks up upon seeing them.

“Alfonse! It’s been a long while. Come, have a cigar!”

His voice is thundering and jovial, his eyes a cool blue and hair dark. He’s slightly shorter than Mikasa but his presence is bold enough that she’d never describe him as small.

“Thank you, Lord Reiss,” Alfonse says happily, putting the clipped cigar between his lips and inhaling as he lights it.

“Who is this beautiful creature?”

Alfonse’s chest puffs up with pride at this.

“This is Jade.”

He says the lie of a name so certainly that Mikasa has to stop herself from laughing, but Mikasa does wonder how real Jade is in moments like this, if Jade is more of a person than Mikasa at this point.

Lord Reiss looks her up and down appraisingly and puts a hand on Alfonse’s shoulder.

“What a refined gift for yourself after a deal well struck. I’m glad that we could provide you with a nice evening.”

Mikasa knows conversations like this are meant for her to ignore, so ignore it she does as Alfonse congratulates himself on his ability to appreciate the finer things in life. Her mind turns to how thrilled her client seems to be impressing this family who seems no different from any other noble family they’d encountered out in the main hall.

_No, that’s not true._

Mikasa can’t exactly place why, but there’s something different about these people, something that isn’t quite like everyone else. It’s a strange feeling that she can’t quite place. Something simply seems off, as if she’s somehow being deceived even though she has no reason to think that.

There’s a tall, handsome-looking young man with dark hair, two younger boys, one with the same dark hair and another with blonde hair that seems that it was spun from sunshine.

But most striking of all is the dark-haired woman.

She sits on a plush red sofa by herself dressed simply in a soft pink dress with silken white gloves. Her hair hangs loosely over her shoulders, her expression blank as she observes the room.

This woman can’t be much older than her but Mikasa gets an overwhelming feeling of something strange, that there is something old...even ancient, about her.

Odder still, the whole room seems to somehow be revolving around her. Everyone’s energy and conversation, even if independent, is in her control.

The woman’s blank blue eyes meet hers and Mikasa shivers.

“I’ve heard about you,” the woman says.

Her voice is gentle and soothing yet simultaneously unsettling. Mikasa is so surprised to be spoken to directly that she doesn’t say anything.

“Come here for a moment. After all, this is why you’ve been brought here.”

Alfonse looks confused at this comment, but his confusion quickly shifts to irritation. He all but shoves Mikasa forward toward the woman on the couch. The littlest of the children continues to play with a doll on the ground, but everyone else in the room is looking at her.

“Frieda,” Lord Reiss says, his tone bordering on a reprimand though there’s an edge of fear and caution.

“I’m simply curious, Father. I’ve never seen someone Asian before,” she pauses and takes off a glove, a gesture that makes her Father break out into a cold sweat and her siblings look to her with wide eyes. “Or at least, not with my own eyes.”

Mikasa sits next to Frieda on the sofa and averts her eyes in what she hopes is a show of deference.

Frieda reaches for Mikasa’s hand, her neatly manicured nails smooth over her wrist and back of her hand. Frieda closes her eyes for a moment.

Mikasa doesn’t understand what’s supposed to be happening. All she knows is she feels the eyes of everyone in the room on her.

Frieda opens her eyes and laughs an odd, almost whimsical sound that does nothing to cut the tension in the room.

“Nothing, nothing at all.”

Frieda lets go of her hand and Mikasa quickly pulls away as if burned.

“It would have worked if she were only half.”

Mikasa still has no idea what they’re all speaking of, but she can tell whatever it is she’s not supposed to know. She glances at Alfonse, because despite how vile he is, he’s the most familiar thing to her in this room. Even he seems a little bit confused, though she can tell that he’s trying to pretend he isn’t.

“I think, perhaps, that she may be half like you, Kenny.”

There’s a rude snort of laughter and out of the shadows a man steps forward.

He’s dressed informally in an unbuttoned trench coat with his hands shoved in the pockets carelessly. His dark brown hair is streaked with grey, and though his shoulders are hunched forward casually he still stands taller than most men. He has an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth that he takes out of his mouth as he leers at her. It’s then that she feels it.

Mikasa knows from the way he looks at her that he could kill her — maybe even would like to. That he’s killed many before. She backs away to the opposite end of the sofa without thinking. Her heart races in her chest and her hair stands on end. She doesn’t understand how everyone in this room doesn’t sense it, doesn’t feel the power emanating off of this grinning man.

He looks her up and down, his grin widening as he starts to laugh, a laugh that contains no joy or mirth but instead makes Mikasa tremble with fear.

“I’ve never seen anyone less like me in my whole damn life,” he sneers.

“Perhaps it’s time you go.” Frieda’s words hold weight, an authority that makes Mikasa feel as if there is no room for deviation from this suggestion. Her gaze is unnaturally distant, as if she’s not truly seeing what is in front of her but instead something else that is only clear to her.

Mikasa stands and attempts to make the movement casual but she stumbles over her feet to Alfonse.

She’s never been more thankful to follow a client to bed.

.

.

Afterwards the carriage takes her back to the Underground City’s gaping maw in the ground. Her body feels sore and used by a man more vile than she’s had in recent memory, but despite this she still can’t stop thinking about the laughing killer.

Mikasa ignores the brothel madam’s cruel gaze as she walks up the creaking staircase to her bedroom. She all but rips away the fine beaded gown and tosses it with far too little care over a chair. Someone will come to collect it later. Finery gifted to whores belongs not to an individual but to the bordello itself. Mikasa doesn’t care; she has no desire for such things. She pulls on her tattered nightgown and sits near the window.

Fiona has left her thistle root tea on the bedside table as requested. With shaking hands Mikasa lights a candle to warm the kettle of precious water.

She tries to think of the Doctor’s Son but can’t stop wondering about the Reiss family and her encounter with the murderous man named Kenny.

_What had Frieda meant when she’d said it would have worked if I were only half? What would have worked?_

The more Mikasa thinks upon this the more certain she is that the entire evening had not been meant to serve as a gift to Alfonse Schuler but rather a means for her meeting with the Reiss family and their terrifying guard.

She drinks her tea then washes herself with rags and water. Bruises are blooming on her legs and hips that will make her undesirable to wealthier clients for the next week or so.

Mikasa sighs. She can expect more modest bookings in the next few days, though nothing so lowly that it would make her seem common. Her entire appeal and the price Mr. Bauer charges is based almost entirely upon the fact that she is a commodity.

_If everyone has had something rare, that thing is no longer rare then, is it?_

The guard’s grin and the glint in his eyes is branded in her mind. Even when she closes her eyes to sleep it’s all she can see. She still remembers that power that radiated off of him and how it’d felt like a palpable presence in the room.

She tosses and turns for hours, unable to fall into even a fitful sleep. Giving up, Mikasa stares out the window.

It’s late in the night and the neighborhood is busy. An old woman, shoulders sloped and carrying a too-heavy looking basket hobbles down the street. A group of children run about, shouting at one another as they kick a ball back back and forth, nothing to out of the ordinary.

A soft knock on the door tears her eyes away from the window.

_Who could that be?_

Mikasa isn’t accustomed to guests at this hour. All the same Mikasa opens the door to find the madam. But standing next to her is the Reiss guard, holding a gun to her head.

“You can leave now,” he growls.

The madam falls to the ground and cries but Mikasa can’t move to help her, her breath stolen from her lungs as she looks up at the towering man.

He pushes her aside and steps into her room, shutting the door behind him carelessly.

“This ain’t so bad for a whore, though I suppose yer one o’ them fancy types.”

Mikasa tries to speak, tries to ask him what he wants with her but the words don’t come. She still feels it, feels his strength in the room so strongly that it’s stifling.

_If he wants me I won’t fight._

“ _Fancy_  whores with  _fancy_  clothes and fancy perfume, yer still a whore.”

Mikasa’s knees buckle and she collapses onto the ground. With trembling hands she starts to unbutton the front of her nightgown. It’s the bravest thing a coward like her can manage to do in spite of her tears.

He glances at her and looks confused for a brief moment, then starts to laugh. Mikasa stops unbuttoning her gown and watches him laugh so much that tears spring to his eyes and he clutches at his stomach, doubled over as he laughs.

“You stupid slut,” he says, his voice still tinged with amusement. He reveals a switchblade of silver, the metal reflecting in the lamp-lit room. “I’m not interested in your pretty Oriental twat.”

He picks her up by the throat and Mikasa sobs as he shoves her roughly up against the wall.

_This is it. I’m going to die here._

This man, for whatever reason, has marked her for death. No one is coming to save her. Her father is long dead and her mother’s life was already sacrificed in the name of her cowardice.

Her vision swims as she struggles for air. His whole hand fits around her throat so easily. She’s certain he could snap her neck like a twig, that it takes no effort for him to hold her like this, her arms limp and shoulders sagging.

“Though I do see the appeal, pretty little thing that ya are.”

He presses harder against her throat and she gasps for air. His eyes are wild and angry as he presses her against the wall with such force it creeks.

“Yer not gonna fight? This is it?”

He presses the knife to her cheekbone beneath her right eye and breaks the skin, her tears stinging the open flesh.

“Yer just gonna let me kill you? Roll over and die like the sad little whore ya are.”

_He’s right._

She sobs. This is all she is, all she ever has been. No one is coming to save her, and no one will mourn her when she is gone.

“Yer gonna die if ya don’t fight,” he growls, his face so close to hers that she feels his breath on her, “if ya fight, ya might live,” he hisses.

She looks into his eyes, wild with fury and even exhilaration as he squeezes the life out of her, her blood dripping down her cheek.

 _Die_.

Mikasa has never faced death.

_Die._

She has hardly even lived.

_Die._

How is she supposed to die so soon?

_Die._

Her mother died trying to save her from this fate.

 _Die_.

Was it all for nothing?

 _Die_.

Mikasa feels it. She feels it in the quiet around them, a spark roaring into flame, a flower opening to the sun’s rays, lightning strike upon a mountain top, an overwhelming power inside of her that had slumbered now awakened by her will, it pulses through her veins, ripples through her being between her body and everything around her with such force that she has no choice but to move, to push, to fight. She rips his hand off her throat, her untrained body moving on instinct alone as she shoves her assailant against the wall so hard it cracks and plaster falls from the ceiling.

“NO!”

She’s not afraid anymore. The overwhelming energy she’d felt from him, that power that had made her tremble with fear is now her own, flowing from within as she knocks the wind out of him.

He gasps for breath but places a hand over her own assuredly. She grinds her teeth and grunts as he pries her fingers away, her arms trembling as she tries to resist his superior strength.

He pushes her away and she lunges toward him, a movement every bit the animal urge for survival it is.

He manages to pin her arms behind her back as she struggles.

_I have to escape. I have to fight._

“Alright, alright, you can stop that.”

The door flies open, Mr. Bauer entering the room, his eyes angry and a knife in hand.

“What is the meaning of this!?”

Kenny lets go of Mikasa’s wrists lazily. Mikasa falls to the ground but quickly gathers herself. She shakes her hands, trying to get the blood flowing back into them and prepare to attack.

“I’m taking that girl.”

Mikasa’s eyes widen.

_What? He was trying to kill me earlier._

“Like hell you are. Jade is my property. She’s indispensable and not for sale, no matter who’s asking!”

Bauer lunges at Kenny but even Mikasa’s untrained eye can see how pathetic it is. Kenny pins the pimp’s arm to his side and grabs his right hand. Kenny pries his fingers apart easily, the knife he’d been wielding falling to the ground.

A quick glimmer of excitement flashes in Kenny’s eyes before he snaps his victim’s index finger like a twig. Bauer howls in agony.

“I wasn’t asking,” Kenny sneers.

He snaps another finger.

“Take her, take her!” Bauer cries out, but Kenny continues snapping fingers.

“Why?!?” Bauer sobs. He’s shrieking inconsolably by now, his handsome face twisting in agony, “I said you can have her!”

“I don’t like pimps,” he frowns, “I don’t like pimps one bit.” Kenny snaps the remainder of Bauer’s fingers like twigs until all ten are a swollen, disjoined mess. Mikasa watches in awe as the man who’d owned her for over a decade collapses to his knees, howling and crying like a child.

Kenny laughs and kicks him in the stomach, no doubt breaking a rib.

Mikasa feels an uncomfortable shiver of excitement

“Get yer things, girl.”

“You just tried to kill me,” Mikasa deadpans.

Kenny snorts amusedly.

“Yer a funny one,” he opens her small closet and throws her shoes at her. “Lesson one: If yer gonna kill someone, do it quick. Don’t play with yer food. If I’d wanted ya dead, I would’ve done it a helluva lot faster than that little performance was.”

Bauer is still writhing around on the ground in pain, but Mikasa tunes it out.

_He … wanted me to fight?_

Mikasa stands up. The power she’d felt earlier hasn’t left, it’s still there lurking beneath the surface, volatile and overwhelming in its immensity.

She looks at her hands, no longer trembling or shaking, and she knows that she’s different from before.

Wordlessly she puts on the shoes he’d thrown at her. She makes to grab her clothes but Kenny stops her.

“Don’t bother with those rags, we’re gonna need ta get ya something more practical,” Kenny glances over at Bauer, who’s still crying, though more quietly, on the ground.

Mikasa is still wary of Kenny but he doesn’t terrify her the same way he had before. She still senses his strength, still understands that if he wanted to he could end her, but the edge of terror she’d felt is gone, chased away by this new power now pulsing through her veins.

She grabs her few personal belongings: a sewing kit, a half-written-in notebook and a ribbon for tying back her long hair.

She doesn’t know where she’s going but she knows that there’s nothing left for her here, that there never was anything and that, whatever lies ahead could at the very least be something.

Kenny nods toward the door and makes to leave. As she follows him, Bauer reaches for her, his mangled, bloody pulp of a hand tugging at the hem of her nightgown.

“I treated you well even though you’re nothing more than a whore,” he hisses. “Do you think you’re gonna survive out there, Jade, the oriental whore?”

Hearing the name that’d enslaved her for years is the breaking point.

She kicks him in the face so hard his body slams into the nightstand. The satisfying sound of his nose breaking spurs her onward. She picks him up by the shirt and slams him into the wall and hits him. Over and over and over again until his face is an unrecognizable arrangement of blood, cartilage and meat.

“My name is Mikasa!”

She spits in his ruin of a face before she lets him fall to the floor, unsure of if he is either unconscious or dead as his blood pools around him.

Kenny grins.

“Messy,” he says appraisingly as he carelessly nudges the pimp’s chin with his toe, “but we’ll work on that, Mikasa.”

Her name said aloud frees her, the self-loathing she’d carried for years gone along with Jade the whore.

They leave and Mikasa doesn’t look back.


	4. Chapter 4

Levi wakes to banging on his door. He rubs his eyes and groans.

_ A few extra hours would be too much luck, wouldn’t it? _

“Oi!! Mister Levi!”

He gets up and ignores the racket as he dresses himself in a loose black shirt and pants. When he finally makes his way to the door, he’s not surprised to see Ari. An orphan around ten years old with dirty blonde hair, Ari is always sporting a bit of dirt on his face. He’s small and unassuming but sly, with a good sense for the street. Levi eyes the large bag Ari is heaving over his back and doubts that assessment. 

_ How the hell did he get all the way over here without getting a shake down? _

He grabs the boy by the ear and pulls him inside. 

“Ow! What’s that for I was just—”

“What have I told you about carrying shit around like this? You’re asking for trouble!”

“I was coming from above—”

“Then wear a big coat and shove shit in the liner like I taught you.”

“I grew out of that coat, it’s too small! And it’s too hot for a coat!”

Levi pinches the bridge of his nose, biting back his frustration. 

“Show me the goods.”

Ari averts his eyes and Levi knows the news isn’t good. 

Levi grabs the bag a little too roughly and dumps the cash out onto the table. 

“This is it? For the Royce job!?”

Ari kicks the ground nervously, a frown on his face.

“I told ‘em you were promised more, but they said you took so long they should’ve owed you less, and they didn’t like how you left him … y’know … all sprawled out naked for the missus to find. She didn’t like it, not one bit.”

“The fuck they want, him laid on a bed of roses wrapped in velvet?!” 

“I dunno, I think they thought you was gonna poison ‘em or something,” Ari shrugs. 

Levi rolls his eyes. These rich types have no idea what goes into this kind of thing. There’s no _instant_ poison, not one he can get his hands on at least. People seem to think it’s some quick, happy-looking, they-died-in-their-sleep kind of thing. To do it right, you need to be slipping the poison to them for a week or more, and that leads to a ridiculous chance for exposure that no one in their right mind is willing to risk. 

Levi sullenly counts the money and lays it into stacks.

“Why the hell they care about the wife finding him anyways?” 

“I think ‘cus the client doesn’t like seeing his mom upset,” Ari says distractedly, clearly focused on the smaller-than-expected stacks of cash.

Levi pauses.

“The client is Royce’s  _ son? _ ”

Ari shrugs and Levi shakes his head. It’s times like this that Levi is reminded why he enjoys distance from his clients.

_ Probably wanted to inherit the family business early.  _

Levi suppresses his disgust. He’s the last person qualified to pass judgement on anyone and focuses again on the cash. He sighs and counts out a modest stack of bills for Ari.

“Here you go, kid.”

Ari’s eyes widen slightly. “You’re still gonna give me this much?”

“It’s what we agreed on. Pocket it before I change my mind,” Levi scowls.

Ari stands up straighter and folds the bills neatly before putting them in a small pouch around his neck that he tucks beneath his shirt. 

“Do you have the newest patrol route maps?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ari fishes around in the large bag and pulls out a thick envelope.

Levi never fails to be impressed at this kid’s sticky fingers; he has a gift for thievery that Levi’s never seen before. He sets the envelope aside to look at later. 

“Before you go, is there anything I should know going on in the neighborhood?” 

“Umm,” Ari puts a hand on his chin, “the Zebs and the Gads had another fight over the big pumping station.”

“Figures.”

Levi fails to feign interest in the gangs that prowl the streets for power and resources. They know better than to try to recruit him to their cause, but knowing what they’re up to can be indicative of strife up above. When the fighting below gets bad, it often has a direct cause above ground. Typically it’s cops or bureaucrats siphoning off tax money. It puts pressure on people to make their money outside of the system. 

Whenever the big pump changes hands, at least two people die. That’s just the way it goes. Water is one of the easiest ways for a gang to make money. Everyone needs it, and it’s easy to threaten people into “donating to the cause” when they’re threatened with lost access. 

“Oh, and other news, Bauer, that big time brothel owner, was killed.”

“Really?”

“Yup, and apparently it wasn’t pretty. His face was smashed all to hell,” Ari says as lightly as if he were discussing the weather or going down to the market. 

There are many bordellos in the Underground. Levi was born in one himself. But Bauer’s whores are something separate. No one down here bothered approaching them; the fees were far too high. Bauer’s whores are known to be beautiful, garbed in fine fabrics, taught to entertain, not to mention that possessing teeth had seemed to be requirement. 

Levi remembers when he had walked past one of Bauer’s girls on the street. The smell of her perfume hadn’t been cheap and pungent but mild and soothing. Her elegant clothing and smooth expression had been completely out of place in the dim, filthy streets of the Underground. But no matter how pretty, whores are still whores; they don’t belong above. 

He remembers that whore, her calm face as she’d walked back to the bordello and seated herself in front of the upstairs window. She’d looked right through him that day. Every time Levi walked past Bauer’s place she’d be there, staring out the window. 

One time he’d stopped to look at her. All the talk of Bauer’s beautiful, untouchable Oriental whore had made even him curious. Her beauty hadn’t been understated. Her expression was distant, as if looking at something only she could see. The longer he’d looked, the sadder he’d felt. Not the usual bleak sadness one feels living in the Underground, but a slow, creeping kind that had followed him around for the rest of the day. 

He’d avoided walking that street after that. 

“Mister Levi?"

Levi shakes his head. “Any word on who’s behind it?” 

Ari leans on the table, precocious and clearly proud of the information he’s about to present.

“I heard from Tom-Tom, who heard from Bullet, who’s cousin Paul saw Kenny the Ripper  _ himself.  _ Yeah, you heard me!”

Levi resents hurt that blooms in his chest at the mention of Kenny. He’d taught Levi everything he knew about the world: how to throw a knife so it sticks, how to punch with your thumb outside your fist so it doesn’t break, how to tell when someone’s lying just by the set of their jaw. He had taught him everything he’d needed to survive and not a bit more, leaving him on his own. 

_ The fuck is he doing down here? In a fucking bordello of all places? _

Levi remembers when Kenny taught him how easy it was to break a kneecap if you hit it  _ just so _ on a pimp who’d pissed him off. Kenny hates pimps.

_ But Kenny doesn’t kill pimps.  _

No, Kenny doesn’t kill anyone unless there’s a purpose, and if Kenny’s going to kill someone he doesn’t bother with torture. He just gets on with it. 

The only real answer is that someone was with Kenny that night. The thought unsettles him. Levi has only heard rumors about Kenny’s comings and goings in the last few years. He isn’t entirely sure how Kenny made the climb out of the Underground pit, but Levi also knows that no one ever  _ truly  _ leaves. At least no one he knows. Regardless, Levi has kept his distance, both because he doesn’t want trouble from a man perhaps more dangerous than any other and the shameful hurt he feels at being left behind. 

“That’s the big news. Anything else before I leave?”

Levi tosses a jacket at Ari.

“Have your Ma sew this to fit you better. No more carrying goods out in the open like a fucking moron,” he grumbles. 

Levi doesn’t miss the Ari’s flustered expression and he fights the urge to say something rude so Ari doesn’t think he’s going soft. 

“She won’t have to sew it too much, since you’re small and all.”

Levi cuffs him upside the head.

“Ow!” 

“Get out of my house, brat.”

Ari sticks his tongue out before he turns and leaves. 

Levi looks at the smaller-than-ideal pile of cash on the table. He’s not going to have anything to save after the tax collector comes this month. 

_ Same as last month.  _

He checks his watch and curses. It’s later than he thought it was. He’s due to guard One-Eye, the local bootlegger, at the market in fifteen minutes. There’s no way he’ll make it on foot, so he’s going to have to use gear if he doesn’t want to be late. 

He hates to waste gas that he needs to either steal or buy at a huge markup on something like this, but Levi doesn’t show up late. He throws on the harnesses with harried efficiency—one time he’d done it too quickly and nearly shit himself when it malfunctioned. He nabbed this set just recently off a drunk cop, so he has to adjust it a little to get it to fit the way he likes. 

He puts the cash in the loose floorboard beneath the mattress for now and locks up his house. He’s not so arrogant to believe that reputation alone will protect his belongings, though it doesn’t hurt.

The gas hisses _ ,  _ propelling him forward. There’s a sweetness to flying through the air, above the filth and people below. The wind rushing against his face creates an illusion of freshness that he always longs for even though he won’t admit it. 

He flings himself through the tunnels, deeper underground to the black market where wares of all kinds are held on display: from stolen fineries to illegal weapons and everything in between, if there’s a demand for it the market has it.  The market is by the Underground, for the Underground. It takes care of its sons and daughters, sad and pathetic as the offering may be it’s something. Levi’s certain there’s not a wider selection of rat stews anywhere to be found. Every now and then a  brave above-grounder, will slink their way down below the surface to gawk and perhaps buy a trinket or two, but it’s a rarity. 

He lands quietly, a skill that had taken him a few tries to get the hang of. The market is already buzzing with excitement for the day, people bartering for a better deal and children playing with warped wooden hoops that hardly roll straight but elicit joy all the same. 

“Levi, almost late,” One-Eye rasps.

Levi doesn’t know One-Eye’s real name, or at least if he had known it at some point he doesn’t remember it. She’s an an old crone with grizzled grey hair, her back hunched over so far that even standing she barely reaches Levi’s shoulder. As her name suggests, she wears an eye patch that covers a milky white eye that she uses to scare misbehaving children. 

One-Eye brews the finest white liquor around. Sure, it tastes like it’ll make you go blind and smells like it’ll singe the hairs inside your nose, but it’s the most affordable way to take the edge off of life there is. She also sells a less potent but slightly more palatable fermented juice that doesn’t knock you on your ass as hard as the liquor but also doesn’t taste like you just got kicked in the crotch. 

Levi glares and crosses his arms. “Almost doesn’t matter for anything.” 

Levi has been standing guard for One-Eye weekly for as long as he can remember. He doesn’t know why One-Eye even bothers paying him: she’s reached an age that garners respect even in the Underground. People don’t live too long down here, and her grey hair and sloped shoulders are the greatest indicator of survival anyone can show. 

She’d started out a laundress, scrubbing her hands raw for those above and below alike until she’d gotten the bright idea to use a metal washtub to distill nearly spoiled grain thrown away above ground. 

To be fair, drunks can be as desperate as any strung out druggie, so Levi spends the next few hours giving intimidating glares at stumbling men drinking out of bags and eyeing One-Eye’s stall. The ones that don’t get the hint end up kicked aside.

“Slow day for business,” One-Eye rasps as she slowly packs up her shop. “Thanks for coming around anyways.” 

She hands him a cut of her profit for the day. He nods and puts the handful of coins in his pocket, mentally noting to store them away for taxes. He doesn’t keep coins on him — they’re too noisy and his life often depends on his ability to be silent. 

It can be difficult to tell night and day apart underground, so the underground never truly sleeps. There’s always business to be done, always some sort of side hustle to have. Levi continues the rest of his business for the day, all simple odd jobs. Last on his list for the day is collect rent that’s two months overdue for an above ground landlord who owns the whole block. 

The buildings are in a state of disrepair that’s unusual even by Underground standards; sloping roofs that look ready to cave in at the slightest provocation, cracking foundations and a communal outhouse that smells so foul Levi covers his mouth as he walks past. 

He knocks on the door for a minute but doesn’t receive an answer. 

He sighs and kicks the door, hoping to simply unhinge it but instead the rotten wood breaks, maggots and pulpy wood splintering everywhere.

“Fuck!” he hisses. He frantically brushes himself off, skin crawling at the filth, “I know you’re in there, come and pony up the cash so I can fucking leave!” 

The inside of the apartment is crumbling as much as he’d expect from the condition of the outside. It’s hard to believe people pay to live in shitholes like this, but a roof is a roof, and plenty of people disappear without shelter. He doesn’t want to go in but he steps over the rotting door remnants and sighs wearily. 

“Come out or I’ll make you, and I can assure you that you won’t like my way!”

It’s futile, so he searches the small apartment, resisting the urge to pinch his nose the until he finds the tenant. A thin, almost skeletal man dressed in rags hides behind a chair. 

Levi grabs the man by what remains of his thinned hair and drops him unceremoniously on the chair.

“You know what I’m here for.”

“I don’t want no trouble!”

Levi fights the urge to roll his eyes.

“Then pay up.”

“I already paid this month,” he lies unconvincingly, his eyes shifting erratically around the room.

Levi grabs him by the chin to get a good luck. His face is covered with scratches and scabs. Up close he’s younger than he looks. Levi can smell his rotten breath as he panics and tries to pull away.

_ Pupils are different sizes, he’s definitely a druggie.  _

Just what he wanted to deal with today. Levi grabs the man’s index finger wearily. “Unless you go and get whatever little cash you have laying around this shithole, I’m gonna get a lot less nice.” 

“You ain’t real nice as it is—”

Levi snaps the finger and his charge howls in pain.

“I don’t have it! I don’t have the cash!”

Levi grabs his middle finger and bites back a sigh. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t have spent it all on whatever the fuck people are huffing these days—”

“No, no, no!”

Levi breaks another finger, ignoring the pathetic attempts at shaking him off with sad, flailing kicks at his shin, about as effective as a fly bothering a horse. 

“I really don’t  _ want  _ to listen to your pathetic crying anymore, so if you just go and get whatever cash you have and give it to me, I’ll leave you with the rest of your fingers intact. You’ve got eight more good ones, that’s not so bad.” 

The man is pathetically sobbing already, so Levi is hopeful that this won’t last much longer. 

“If I give you my cash I won’t have anything for the tax collector, I’ll get put in the stretcher!” 

“That’s not my problem,” Levi reaches for the middle finger and the man shakes and screams, trying to wrangle himself free enough that Levi actually struggles with him a little. He’s taller, and flailing about and manages to scratch Levi’s face. Levi grits his teeth and shoves him hard against the wall. He pins the druggie’s hands behind his back, holding him there with his forearm.

“Now you’ve scratched my face with your shitstained nails and pissed me off. Tell me where your cash is or I skip your fingers and go straight to busting knees!” 

Levi’s threat hangs in the air. He’s bluffing a little bit — if he fucks him up too bad he’ll get incoherent, and Levi will end up leaving the place empty handed  _ and  _ with a headache. People usually pony up after the first finger, but if Levi’s suspicions are right this guy’s strung out on his latest fix and his pain tolerance is higher than normal. 

Levi sighs and adjusts his grip so that his charge is pinned to the wall by his forearm.

“ALRIGHT! ALRIGHT! Top dresser drawer! Top dresser drawer!” he sobs. The man’s a hiccuping, twitching mess when Levi drops him unceremoniously on the ground.

Levi holds his breath as he rifles through the dirty laundry in the drawer and finds a little over half the money that is owed.

“Landlord’s not gonna be happy,” Levi says over the sobbing dryly. “This isn’t enough.”

The man ignores him, cradling his mangled hand as Levi pockets the bills and change in his pocket. He wipes his hands on his pant leg as if doing so would get rid of the invisible grime he feels settling on his skin. 

Levi is all too happy to leave. 

“You’re a traitor, no better than above-grounders!”

The words stop him, his body halted by the weight of the accusation.

“Yeah! You heard me, you’re worse than trash, turning on someone like me for someone up above!” 

He grits his teeth and clenches his fists before he turns around and kicks the man in the stomach, a satisfied feeling in his chest as the man slams into the wall across the room with a definitive thud.

“Maybe you’re right.” Levi looks down at the crumpled heap of a man, unsure of if his disgust is with him or himself. 

“Pay your fucking rent,” he spits.

The whole way home the druggie’s words buzz around in his head.  _ Worse than trash.  _ It hadn’t always been like this, had it? But here he is now, killing fathers for greed, maiming the poor, all so he can survive to pay up for next month. 

He remembers a job where he’d had to kill a little old lady standing in the way of the client’s inheritance. He remembers her sickly sweet perfume and how she’d worn a ring on each finger of her left hand, how easy it had been to sneak up on her. But strangely enough the thing he remembers most vividly of all was her collection of birds. 

Big birds, small birds, songbirds, catbirds, blackbirds, bluebirds — she’d kept them all in beautiful golden cages, inside a sunlit room with the finest seeds grown all the way out in the exterior. Each of them with wings trimmed to uselessness, awaiting their next meal from the old woman. 

He’d left the birds in the cages. He hadn’t even thought to free them. 

Levi flings himself through the air, wasting far more gas than he should to get home in half the time it would normally take. 

Perhaps he has become accustomed to his cage. He doesn’t know anymore if someone has trimmed his wings or if perhaps he was born without them, but there’s one thing Levi knows for certain: in this world it is either eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, live or die. 

Maybe he is worse than trash, he thinks, no better than a rabid animal some days or a pathetic bird in a cage others. 

But at least he survives. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a shorter chapter. with lots of violence. next chapter is longer. with still lots of violence. <3 I promise it will be worth the wait! Thanks for all the support so far.

The floor is cold and damp on her bare feet, the only light in the room a dim gaslamp that hangs from above, tenuously connected to the cracking ceiling.

Mikasa is farther below than she’s ever been. This bunker is nestled into a darkness that is appropriate only for things that need to be hidden. It’s an odd thing to be hidden inside these walls; the dank, low ceiling closing in on her in a way she’s not sure she will ever be accustomed to but embraces all the same.

She’s not sure how long it’s been since Kenny brought her here. Days become weeks that span a life.

Since the day she’d fought for her life the world was made anew. There’s a power inside of her, a force stronger than anything she’d ever been able to comprehend that had lain dormant inside of her until that day.

_ I was wonderin’ if you’d feel it too, weak little thing that you’d been.  _

She punches the strawman dummy again and again, the only sounds her hits as they land, her breathing and Kenny’s words in her head.

_ But I can see it in you now. So let’s make you useful. _

This power is so vital, so integral to who she is now she’s not sure if she was truly alive before it. Finally she feels awake, more aware of everything around her, more grounded in what’s real than ever before.

_ Don’t tuck in your thumb unless ya wanna break it when the hit lands.  _

Her body burns as she moves but it’s not fatigue. It’s a sweet, wonderful burn that pushes her forward, energizes her instead of exhausting her. With every hit she swears she’s stronger, faster, better. 

_ Don’t fall into habits, follow your gut.  _

Mikasa has learned how to throw knives with precision, has learned all of the places to slice, to kill with both efficiency and how to make it linger. She’s learned twenty different ways to kill a man as easily as a bird learns to fly.

_ Do it again, this time with your eyes closed. _

But most of all she’s learned herself. How to feel instead of think, how to know with absolute certainty what to do. 

Kenny’s motives for bringing her here are still unclear, but Mikasa understands at least that they’re somehow alike, that this intuition she possesses is something he feels too. 

The clothes that Kenny had given her, a black shirt and loose black pants, had once been large on her small frame. This time has changed not only her mind but her body. Her shoulders have broadened, her hands developed calluses and her legs developed thick cords of muscle. 

These changes satisfy her in a way she never would have anticipated. It’s further confirmation that the little girl who watched her parents die, the woman used as a whore, the sad, less-than-a-fly person she had been is gone, replaced with someone powerful, someone strong who will never be hurt again. 

_ The only way to live is to fight. Never forget that.  _

She hears the door open above the stairwell and stops her onslaught of punches. She hears Kenny, but there’s also a second set of footsteps.

_ That’s a first.  _

Kenny’s dressed as usual: a black coat that conceals his vertical maneuvering gear, a hat covering his slicked-back hair. With him is a tall blonde woman, her blue eyes cold and her demeanor the same.

“Mikasa, we’re gonna play a game,” Kenny smiles. 

Without warning, the blonde woman lunges at her. Mikasa dodges before she even registers the attack. Her counter flows from the momentum of her evasion, a clenched fist landing true on the woman’s temple. To her credit, the woman merely stumbles instead of flying into the wall. But after a life of waiting there is no hesitation left in Mikasa. 

She kicks her blonde assailant in the stomach. The woman drops to her knees and coughs up blood. A quick punch to the head and she’s on the ground, unconscious. Mikasa fists her hand in the loser’s hair and lifts her limp body. With her left hand, she reaches for the knife strapped to her thigh and holds it at the unconscious woman’s throat.

“Was that supposed to be difficult?” 

Kenny laughs and Mikasa lets the woman fall limp on the ground. 

“Eh, she’s just one of the best the Military Police Brigade has to offer up, poor Traute.” He shakes his head and chuckles again. He doesn’t sound too sorry for her despite his words. 

“Well, I think you’re ready for your graduation exam,” he says, the laughter from moments before completely gone from his voice in a way that’s unsettling even to her. He tosses a bundle of clothes at her: a simple maroon dress with buttons, a set of stockings and a gently used pair of black ankle boots. 

He pulls out a notecard bearing an address.

_ This is far away, outside of Wall Sina.  _

“So I was doing some  _ detective work _ —y’know, with my being an important Police Chief it’s my duty to uphold the law—and I learned a little bit about you. Turns out some well-to-do Doctor filed a police report when he’d found yer parents.”

Mikasa’s eyes widen and her pulse quickens, that day still vivid in her mind. The powerlessness she’d felt as her father fell to the floor and the spray of her mother’s blood is stained into her memory. 

_ The Doctor filed a report. _

She realizes for the first time that she hasn’t thought of the Doctor or his son in weeks. 

“On that card is the address of the guys responsible, three shitbag brothers all still living together on the outskirts of Wall Rose. I even went and checked to make sure the address was good,” he hefts Traute over his shoulder and turns to leave, “go have a good time, think of it as a present from me to you.” 

She looks at him in disbelief and can’t hold it back anymore, the question that’s been bothering her since she came to this place.

“Why did you bring me here? Why did you find me?” she half shouts, her fists clenched and her heart racing at the prospect of his answer.

The smile on his face disappears, replaced by an odd flash of sadness in his eyes that’s gone as quickly as it came.

“Call me sentimental, but you reminded me of someone I failed a long time ago,” his voice is tinged with emotion she finds strange coming from such a harsh man. “That, and I think you’re gonna be really useful,” he checks his watch as he walks toward the stairwell. “Try and make it back as quick as you can. We have work to do.” And with that he leaves.

She puts on the clothes. The full skirt is unfamiliar to her after all this time she’s spent in pants but it’s nothing she can’t adjust to. After she plaits her hair she slings a belt around her waist with two knives that she conceals beneath her coat; she hides another in her stocking. 

Mikasa looks at the address again. She commits it to her memory, repeats it over and over again until it’s an ongoing chant in the back of her mind. She feels a drive inside of her, a sense of purpose that’s new to her after years of doing whatever someone had demanded it of her. 

This is the vengeance she deserves, the vengeance she never knew she wanted but needs all the same. 

_ I’m not a fly, not anymore. _

_. _

_. _

 

The expansive fields between districts in Wall Rose are almost stifling in their vastness. Rolling hills of green striped with fields of amber wheat sprawl out before her. While different from her forested childhood home, the setting reminds her of that simpler time. She thinks of fantastic tales her mother would tell her of faraway lands and of maple sugar made from sap her father tapped from trees. She remembers the warm embrace of people who had loved her.

The world is a crueler place than that, she admits to herself. It always had been. She’s under no illusions that this has changed over the last few weeks. The only difference now is that she refuses to stand aside any longer. 

Once outside of Wall Sina and through Stohess District, Mikasa had stolen the horse of an unsuspecting farmer. She needed it to make decent time to Karanes District.

_ That’s where they are.  _

The idea of the three brothers who’d torn her life apart holed up in a nice home and life they’ve created for themselves is thrilling to her. 

She imagines them sitting down for dinner together, thankful for the modest but pleasing life they’d managed to buy themselves into. It’s not the interior, but it was safer now than titan-infested Wall Maria, and on the eastern side, too: safer than the south but warmer than the north. 

_ They’re just like I was. Unsuspecting and naive.  _

The horse’s breaths are coming in heavy pants, a thin sheen of sweat coating its chestnut hair as she spurs it forward at a punishing pace. Mikasa doesn’t care for the tired animal as her thoughts are far away. Her heart beats loud and fast in her chest, the desire for a revenge she had never dared to dream of so strong that it consumes her completely. 

She reaches the entrance to Karanes District as the sun begins to fall below the horizon, painting vivid red hues across the sky. The main road is paved with cracking stone. Tufts of grass spring up from the dirt. The homes are almost all painted white, with shutters on the windows of clear glass and sagging roofs made of yellow straw. 

Mikasa observes three soldiers with roses on their jackets drinking out of a large bottle and laughing with one another, red-faced and inattentive as they chat amongst themselves. She avoids them all the same as she ties up the horse. Even if they seem incompetent, she doesn’t want to risk being memorable. Slinging her bag over her shoulder, she leaves the main road and explores the sidestreets. 

The address hangs in her memory, but she almost feels like she doesn’t need it, that a part of her simply knows where to go. Or perhaps a force outside of her control is guiding her to her prey, whispering in her ear as she draws nearer. 

The house is modest and unassuming. It matches the ones next to it but for a different number and a coat of arms, a boar’s head fielded by two sabres, emblazoned on the doorpost. Mikasa bites back a laugh.

_ As if they’re some sort of well-to-do family. _

She walks up the stairs, the dim twilight not enough to make a shadow as she raises her hand and knocks on the door.

Six heartbeats later the door opens. 

“Pardon the intrusion.”

The words come out easily, words said by the very man in front of her that merge that rainy day a lifetime ago with the present. 

This time there will be no survivors. Her knife is so quick on his throat that she doesn’t even see fear in his eyes as she pushes inside and stuffs a handkerchief in his mouth to muffle his gasp. The blood sprays out thick, hot and arterial, then slows. She lets him drop to the ground and kicks him away from her.

_ One.  _

Mikasa hears rustling in the next room. She stands there and waits for them to find her. She wants them to see her, wants them to see their brother dead on the floor. She wants them to be afraid. 

She remembers the second brother’s face well. He’s the one who had arrived afterward and made sure her wrists were bound so tightly she couldn’t feel them. 

“Matt, who was it—”

His eyes widen with horror as he takes in the sight of his brother lying dead on the floor. Before he can yell she moves, her feet fast across the uneven wood floor as she grabs the second brother by his wrists. Her body is tense with power, the force of it so volatile that she feels she’ll burst if she doesn’t move. She pushes him to his knees and sinks her knife into the base of his skull where the bone is thin and then upward with an ease that should be unsettling to her.

_ Two.  _

She removes her knife, the second brother dropping limply to the ground with a heavy thud. She doesn’t even feel satisfied. 

_ Where’s number three?  _

Mikasa takes in her surroundings. A modest home littered with personal affects and a fire burning to warm the crisp fall evening. She hears footsteps down the stairs.

“Matt?!? George?!?” 

He looks at her and down to her knife and she watches him fumble, hands trembling as he pulls out a switchblade.

It’s amusing to watch him try to fight, his unpracticed hands stabbing haphazardly at her as she leans side to side to evade him. She trips him and wrestles him into a chokehold, presses against his windpipe and listens to him gasp for air, his struggle and fear making her heart race wildly in her head. 

“I’d let you plead your case, but there’s nothing you can do to stop this, a kindness you didn’t offer me,” she murmurs into his ear. How many times has she thought she should’ve died that day? How many times had she  _ wished  _ she’d died that day? 

She’s so much stronger than him that it’s unfair when she shoves him against the wall and wraps her hands around his throat. 

He tries futily to pry her hands free but she pins him there, slowly strangling the life out of him, his eyes bulging and veins bursting in the sensitive skin below his eyes as he struggles. 

She looks into his eyes and there’s a moment of awareness there, a moment she knows he recognizes who she is from long ago, before he goes still. 

Mikasa holds him there for a moment, and then another before she lets him fall to the floor along with his brothers. She wipes her knife on the slip beneath her skirt. The blade gleams orange in the firelight. 

She closes her eyes for a moment, the quiet around her soothing, the power inside of her that had roared to life subsiding in the calm of after. She cleans herself off, not wanting any of their blood on her skin for a moment longer. She packs away her dress and changes into a new one, this one blue with pleats in the skirt.

Mikasa isn’t sure what she had expected to feel in this moment, but she’s neither happy nor sad. There is no justice, no peace—only confirmation.

She grabs her braid at the base of her neck, her knuckles clenched white as she pulls her knife through it, each strand a tether she cuts free. 

_ I am not a fly.  _

She thinks of her mother and how she spoke of her spirit of water, about how it made her wise. Mikasa closes her eyes. She can imagine her mother’s calming spirit and healing words vividly for the first time in years.

Mikasa had always wondered what her spirit had been. She had spent years sure that she wasn’t water, that perhaps she was earth, walked upon and beaten down into whatever it was anyone else desired, or maybe air, invisible, consumed and discarded in equal parts by every living thing.

She stares into the fire burning in the hearth and shakes her head. She throws the braid into the flames, the hairs curling before they ignite and disappear into ash. She wipes the tears she hadn’t noticed crying from her cheeks.

_ I will burn everything until there’s nothing left.  _


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nice long chapter for all of you, you deserve it.

Kenny is pleased with her when she comes back.

“So, did you like how it felt to get a little revenge? Step on some ants?”

Mikasa shrugs. The bunker is the same as always: dark, damp, far below. Kenny sits on a chair, tipping it backwards onto two legs with his feet kicked up on the small table.

“Really? That’s it? You really are a gloomy thing, even if you’re not laying on your back for a roof over your head anymore,” he lights the cigar he always keeps clenched between his teeth, takes a drag of it and exhales, the blue smoke and its heady smell hanging in the air.

“Now that you’ve proved your usefulness, you work for me now. I’m probably better looking than your average customers and I have no interest in hiding myself between your legs, so I think we could both agree it’s a bit of a step up for you, hmm?”

She clenches her fist and glares at him, but she doesn’t disagree.

“These are yer marching orders, as they say in the Brigade,” he hands her a packet of papers. She thumbs through them.

 _Fenuel Inocencio_. Mikasa looks at the illustration: a bearded man no older than fifty with dark hair and a face that looks as if it were carved from stone.

“I need you to take this guy out.”

“Why don’t you just do it yourself?”

He lets the chair rock forward onto all four of its legs and leans over onto his knees. He’s sitting down but still so tall and he glares up at her from a furrowed brow, his expression murderous and cold when moments before he had been joking.

“Because I have you now.” His voice is cold and leaves no room for deviation from his order. But then his demeanor changes as he shrugs, “Besides, the Queen wouldn’t like to hear about this guy eating it, and I don’t want to arouse suspicion. All you need to know is I said something I shouldn’t have in front of this guy and it’s his misfortune, cos he needs to go,” Kenny pantomimes slitting his own throat and sticks out his tongue comedically.

Mikasa knows that she has traded one master for another, but at the very least her chain is longer now. Still, the prospect of inflicting suffering on powerful people excites her. Only a month ago she had been a weak, barely struggling fly. For this reason, she nods.

“Consider it done.”

.

.

Levi tosses a ball up in the air, bored. He stares up at the cracked ceiling of his bedroom while his stomach growls. Lunch was half a potato and a pathetic excuse of broth that may as well have been water, and it isn’t doing anything to make him feel full.

_Fucking lie broth._

He’d go and buy something if he had money, he’d steal something if there was something to steal, but since Wall Maria was breached and overrun by titans food has become scarce. This, compounded with a recent visit from the tax collector, is making even Levi start to feel a little bit desperate.

He needs a job, and preferably a big one, since the Royce job left him high and dry. A knock on the door interrupts his thoughts. Judging by the rhythm, he’s confident it’s Ari.

Sure enough, his scrappy accomplice walks in without being invited, ducking beneath Levi’s outstretch arm blocking the doorway.

“Got a new order for ya, Levi,” Ari grins, his eyes gleaming with excitement.

Levi shuts the door so no one outside will hear and sits down at the table. Ari stares at him blankly, his hands in his pockets.

“Are you just gonna stand there or what?” Levi says, more roughly than Ari deserves.

“I was just waiting til ya were ready, sheesh!” Ari rolls his eyes and digs through his bag and pulls out a piece of parchment folded into a tiny triangle.

Levi watches Ari fumble with the overfolded paper but gets frustrated waiting and grabs it, unfolding it in probably the same amount of time it would’ve taken the boy to do it himself. It can’t be helped: his hunger and empty pockets are riling him up.

“Fenuel Inocencio,” he reads aloud, the name sounds exotic and strange on his tongue. He notes the address, far in the interior of Mitras. “This has to be some fancy nobleman,” he trails off.

Immediately this sets off alarms. A hard job to walk away from unseen. He has killed nobles before, but usually only minor ones that didn’t seem that notable.

Levi shakes his head. “This is too hard. I’ll get caught.”

“What!? Levi—”

“It’s gonna be a bitch and a half to off someone that far in the interior without getting spotted.”

_I’d end up needing to kill at least one other person, no matter how careful I try to be._

With a cocky grin, Ari empties his bag onto the table. Bills and gold coins spill messily, so many that Ari has to shake his bag to get the remainder out. It’s enough that Levi wouldn’t need to take any other jobs that month.

“They paid half up front.”

Levi’s eyes widen.

“ _Half?!_ ”

Ari nods, his eyes crinkling in a smile, “ _Half!”_

Levi reads through the information on the target:

Nobleman. Benefactor to the military, specifically the Scouting Regiment.

_The fuck does a nobleman want with that cult?_

Levi knows that his line of work isn’t particularly safe, but he draws a line at glorified suicide pacts.

He continues reading:

On the outs with the royal family when once favored.

_Is some royal hiring me for this shit?_

Many friends, hosts parties. Will be difficult to catch alone.

Levi sighs and runs a hand through his hair. This is bad news, and he’ll be the luckiest bastard this side of the wall if he makes it out of there unseen without killing twenty witnesses.

He glances at the money on the table and his reservations vanish. This is enough for him to pay all of next month’s bills, give Ari a generous cut for his ailing mother, and maybe have a little to save.

He thumbs one of the coins, newly minted and shining in the light of the room.

“Alright, tell them to give me a week.”

_I’ll just have to be better than I’ve ever been._

_._

_._

The mansion is overwhelmingly large. Its architecture differs from anything Mikasa has seen. Clay red tiles line the roof. Sloping arches frame beautiful glass windows with torches illuminating them from the outside. A reflecting pool in the front yard shimmers like diamonds in the setting sun.

Mikasa has tried almost a week to find a quiet evening, but Lord Fenuel Inocencio insists upon throwing crowded, rowdy parties every evening. This was the world Mikasa inhabited for many years—fancy parties with a shiny, beautiful veneer of fantasy made for those who can afford to dream.

She sits behind a shrub and waits for an opportunity to sneak in. After about thirty minutes, she notices uniformed men and women entering and exiting through a side door.

_It must be a shift change._

After the traffic abates, she sneaks in and finds a spare uniform, hides in a broom closet and changes. The dress is a little short on her but not enough to make her seem out of place. The lace bonnet hides her newly short hair.

Just as she shuts the closet door, another maid appears behind her.

“I haven’t seen you around, are you the new girl?”

Mikasa whips her head around and sees a young woman with striking red hair, freckled skin, and a kind face.

“Yeah,” Mikasa says, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear.

“I’m Liza,” she smiles, a dimple waking in her cheek. “I can show you the ropes tonight, what’s your name?”

“Hana,” Mikasa blurts out quickly. Liza gives her an odd look but dismisses it as nerves.

Mikasa can’t say no to such a kind offer without arousing suspicion, so she accepts. Liza takes her through an elaborate series of passages built to keep servants out of view. The passage is so narrow Mikasa’s skirt brushes up against both sides of the wall. The lighting is so dim she can hardly see, but Liza knows the passage by memory. Mikasa can hear the loud music, dancing and laughter through the thin walls.

Moving from room to room, Mikasa spends the evening turning down linens and polishing silver.

_How the hell am I supposed to get away?_

“So where are you from?”

Mikasa has to think for a moment.

“The exterior,” she says clipply.

Liza’s face goes white and she tugs the bed linen they’re stretching over the mattress harder than she needs to.

“Did you... _y’know…_ ”

Mikasa stares at her blankly.

“See a…” Liza gestures, her hand wildly over her head, “a _titan?_ ” she whispers.

_Oh. The wall breach._

Mikasa thinks of her parents. They hadn’t lived far from the breach, not far at all, and her childhood home would be uninhabitable today, well into titan-infested territory.

She hasn’t thought much about this before. What would have happened had they all lived? Would they have survived? Would they have fled to Wall Rose and made a happy little home there?

She sees her father’s blood pooling on the floor and hears her mother’s cry.

“Hana?”

Mikasa shakes her head.

_Don’t think about things like that. Not now._

“Sorry, it’s just hard for me to think about,” she laughs lightly, “my parents were eaten by titans,” she lies easily.

Liza’s eye’s widen and she shakes her head. “I’m so sorry, that was so rude of me,” she stumbles over her own foot as she tries to fluff a down-stuffed pillow.

“It’s okay, I don’t mind. We’d better be off to the next room though, right?”

“Right,” Liza agrees, clearly relieved. “There’s no servant’s passage to Lord Inocencio’s chambers, so we’ll need to take the main hallways. Try to walk your best, nice and proper-like, okay?”

Mikasa nods. They leave the room and walk through the grand hallway to a winding staircase, up a tower to a room with a heavy wooden double doors and iron wrought handles that twist into the head of what appears to be a large, snarling cat.

“What is this?” Mikasa asks, examining the handle.

“Oh, it’s a made-up creature called a lion,” Liza replies simply as she pushes the heavy door open and gestures to follow her inside. “It’s the symbol for Lord Inocencio’s family. Kinda pretty, don’t you think?”

Mikasa doesn’t agree or disagree, too overwhelmed by the sight before her.

The chamber is grand, grander than anything Mikasa has seen. The ceiling is raised and supported by wooden beams. On the ceiling are windows that show moonlight and stars. Beneath her feet is plush, maroon carpet that looks so soft she has to resist the urge to reach down and touch it with her fingers. Most impressive of all, however, is the collection of books. Shelves line the entire wall, curved to fit the circular room perfectly. Books with thick, leather-bound spines and gold leaf titles that sound lofty and abstract: _On the Importance of Living_ and _The Impetus of Man_ are two of the titles that jump out to her.

Liza chuckles.

“I forget, it’s a little overwhelming at first. We’re just here to turn down the bedding. The number one rule about Lord Inocencio’s chambers is don’t touch the desk. Number two rule is don’t touch the books—don’t even dust them.”

“Why?” Mikasa asks before thinking.

Liza shrugs. “I dunno, maybe they’re too fancy for us to touch. They look pretty fragile and Lord Inocencio is very particular. I’m thankful because _boy_ are there a lot of books, saves us a bunch of work! ”

Mikasa is confused but ignores this comment. Liza rambles about the linens, everything from thread count, material, the particular season each different set is used for and why they’re using this set for this day—all mundane details that, were she actually a maid, Mikasa would care about.

Instead her eyes wander to the forbidden desk carved of dark mahogany with intricate designs up the legs. Peaking out beneath a cover she sees thick stationary with an embossed letterhead. It looks odd, like wings, perhaps of a bird arranged into an emblem of some kind.

_The Survey Corps? What does a nobleman want with them?_

Mikasa pulls the cover of the file aside. The letter is written in neat cursive script without a single drop of ink out of place. The letter details casualties and a request for supplies. It’s signed by someone stylized as Commander Erwin Smith. There’s a postscript, but before she can read it Liza hollers at her.

“What did I tell you!? No looking at the desk!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help but be curious about the Scouting Legion. They seem so brave, after all.”

Liza buys it and relaxes a little, because no matter how kind she is the woman clearly is denser than stone.

“Yeah, well, try to focus on the task at hand,” Liza grabs her arm and brings her over to the four-poster bed.

“He sleeps on this side. I’ll show you how to take coals from the brazier and warm the bedding for him,” Liza loads a heavy copper pan with red-hot coals that shine even brighter when Liza blows on them gently. She covers the pan with a lid, lifts up the mattress and places it beneath.

“You ladies are hard at work.”

Liza gasps and immediately falls into a deep curtsy as Lord Inocencio enters the room.

He’s by far the most handsome man Mikasa has ever met. His skin is a shade of olive unlike any she’s seen before. He has thick, black hair that is combed neatly to one side, not so polished that it seems deliberate but rather naturally neat. He has a heavy brow that makes him look masculine as opposed to brutish and a bump in his nose that on another face would look unattractive but on his makes him appear regal. His lips are generous and smirking amusedly as he looks at them. He’s dressed finely in a navy velvet jacket with black silken cord and buttons of gold that are embossed with the same lion’s head as on the door handle.

Mikasa curtsies at Liza’s panicked expression, albeit a little sloppier and unpracticed.

“Milord! I was just showing the new maid how to best serve you. I didn’t know you would be back from your event so early. Please forgive us and we’ll be on our way.”

“It’s quite alright.”

Lord Inocencio looks at Mikasa and she immediately feels it, that peculiar weight of a man’s eyes on her that has never failed to make her feel dirty and disgusted. But before it can take hold and overwhelm her she pushes the feeling aside. She notes the weight of the knife she has holstered in her stocking.

_He may be looking at me like something to devour now, but he’s wrong. I can use this._

Mikasa averts her eyes demurely from his gaze and looks up at him through her eyelashes. She shifts her weight to one leg and gently softens her posture. Men like to feel powerful, Mikasa thinks, and surrounding themselves with soft things is usually the way they achieve this.

He approaches her until she stands entirely in his shadow.

“I think I’d like to personally see if you’ve taught the new maid well, just to be certain. Perhaps you could leave us so I know that you’re not slipping her answers, hmm?”

Liza swallows nervously. She nods and all too hastily leaves the room but not before giving Mikasa a worried glance.

The heavy door shuts and they’re alone.

.

.

_Fuck, really?_

Levi has been sitting in this armoire for an hour now. He can see what’s going on through the crack between the two doors, but he can’t move for fear of making a sound. His thigh is starting to cramp up and his ass is going numb from the constricted blood flow. The maid normally comes up alone but tonight she brought a friend.

_And they’re chatty._

He strains his eyes to look through the small crack between the doors. His target typically retires far later than this, so not only is it unusual that he’s up from his party so early, but even worse that he’s asked the new maid to stay behind.

He can’t see very clearly, but the new maid must be a looker because Levi recognizes that tone of voice.

_They’re gonna screw and I’m stuck here._

Levi bites back a groan. He wishes he could go back, try again another day, but he’s too far in. He’s made it this far, all the way up the tower without being seen and sat in the damn armoire for over an hour.

Hopefully this presents an opportunity. He’s resigned himself to likely needing to kill the maid too, just like he’d expected. It’s unfortunate—she’s probably done nothing too bad, but he isn’t going to pass up a chance to get the job done.

Still, the idea of extra blood on his hands doesn’t sit well with him. He hopes he can be quick enough out the window that she doesn’t get a look, if he does manage the kill. Otherwise he’ll have to wait until Inocencio’s asleep, and then it’s dark and quiet, more difficult to sneak out of the armoire, more chances to be discovered—no, he has to get this done with. Levi holds back a sigh.

_Get your rocks off, buddy. You never know which day may be your last, after all._

_._

_._

“What’s your name?”

“It’s Hana,” she says politely.

“That’s a lovely name. Are you from the exterior?”

“How did you know?”

He smiles and shrugs casually. “It just seems to be a common name of those I’ve encountered from the exterior.”

His voice is smooth and calm, yet there’s a charisma there that Mikasa can’t help but feel drawn to. That alone is enough to make her wary. People that confident are usually liars; they do it so well that they don’t even realize it.

“Did you want me to demonstrate how to turn down the bedding, my Lord?”

“Actually, I’m not very interested in the linens. I wanted to ask you about something. May I pour you a drink?”

She feigns surprise and nervousness. “What could you want to share with a maid like me?”

It’s more difficult to do this now than it used to be. Feigning such innocence and weakness when she can feel the volatile, pulsing strength to snap his neck in two surging through her body is draining. She could do it, she could do it right now. She can see it play out in her mind, that beautiful tan throat between her hands as she twists, that smug confidence gone as his charming face contorts in his final moments. The anger she feels constantly burning inside of her swells at the thought and part of her is gleeful at the image.

But she wants to know more about the secrets in this room, and her desire to inflict her wrath on those around her loses to her curiosity. Men talk when they’re happy, and she knows how to make men feel happy.

He walks confidently to the small bar and pours amber liquid into two glasses carved of crystal without waiting for her response.

She pretends to sip the liquor politely.

“What if I told you that things aren’t as they seem? That we’re all living in a strange dream, right now?”

Mikasa tilts her head a little, but he looks at her for an answer.

“I’d be confused.”

He sips his drink and looks at her over the rim with dark eyes through dark eyelashes. He finishes half of the drink in one sip and walks over to her and stands too close to her for it to be appropriate.

“There are secrets all around us, in the air we breathe, in the ground we walk upon, in the walls that protect us…take off your bonnet”

She doesn’t understand what her bonnet has anything to do with what he’s talking about, but she listens to him all the same. He watches her closely as she sets the glass down on his desk and unties the white lace bonnet carefully. She sets that beside the glass and leans back slightly on the desk, resting her hands on the edge of it.

“Your hair is very short,” he comments absently, his voice objectively pleasing. He smooths his hand from her shoulder to her wrist gently.

“I burned it very badly when I should’ve had it pinned back so I had to cut it.” She pauses and deliberately pouts a little. “I hope it isn’t too displeasing.”

Inocencio looks her up and down again, the feeling of being a pretty trinket familiar and as frustrating as it’s always been. Shame wars with anger as he pulls her sleeve up to her forearm unexpectedly.

_My scar!_

He traces his hand over the marking on her forearm. She’s so used to covering it that having it visible and touched by a stranger is worse than appearing naked.

“I saw this when you were turning down the bedding with that other maid,” he looks up at her, his eyes alight with a madness that makes Mikasa feel afraid for the first time in a while. “You’re different. I suspected as much when I saw you, but when I saw this I was certain.”

_Certain of what?_

His words carry a strange weight, a reverence that most people use when speaking of religion or love. He’s not just talking about her appearance and it unsettles her.

He presses his mouth to her wrist and she feels panic settling in her chest.

_No, don’t freeze up. Don’t be weak. You can do this._

She grits her teeth and endures his affections as he presses kisses that feel like burns up her arm and to her throat. He pushes her so she’s sitting on the desk and he’s in between her legs.

“Once the Scouting Legion follows through on their part of the bargain, I’ll be a king,” he breathes into her ear, disgust twisting her stomach the whole while. “Perhaps you’d enjoy looking upon the face of a king.”

He kisses her mouth and fits his hand in her cropped hair as he plunders away with his teeth and tongue. Her stomach churns and her chest tightens with anger as he grabs at her breast through her dress. It’s too much for her, her will to know the ravings of a madman doused by her disgust.

She closes her eyes for a moment and lets herself retreat to the part of her mind that is calm, where she is in control, where she can do anything. She holds herself there for a second, lets herself feel it swell inside of her until she has no doubts or fears, her shame and disgust from earlier simply spectres of the past.

Mikasa shoves her knife into his chest with a sharp thrust, the razor sharp point burrowing through cartilage. He gasps and coughs blood into her face as she twists it.

She watches the light leave his eyes and feels a brief sense of calm.

Until she notices someone looking at her over the dead man’s shoulder, his eyes cold yet somehow burning as he looks into her own.

.

.

Her eyes steal the breath from his lungs and freeze him in his place. His feet have sprung roots that burrow into the carpeted floor, through the stone and mortar to the earth below. Her gaze fills him with energy, the power that always lurks deep inside of him matched by this woman.

Levi’s grip on his knife wavers, the blood of Inocencio pooling on the ground from their simultaneous attack. They stand there for a moment, the dead man’s stiffening body doing nothing to fill the space between them that crackles with energy and whispers of the unknown.

She is first to move. Inocencio’s body drops to the ground with a thud as she moves quickly to the side, her skirt fluttering with the motion as she charges at him. He moves backward and barely dodges as a blow meant for his head splinters the armoire he’d been hiding in moments before with strength that can only be described as brutal.

She’s relentless in her onslaught, producing a blade from her other stocking and twirling it in her hand before she attacks him with a hard slash that he barely avoids. Her body flows from the momentum of the attack and into a punch that he isn’t quick enough to dodge but manages to catch with his hand, the force of it jarring him down to his bones.

Her skill with a knife is unlike anything he’s seen, each slash backed with power befitting a butcher but a technique so precise it must be felt rather than calculated.

Levi abandons himself to his instinct in a way he hasn’t needed to in years, his body moving intuitively, the energy crackling between the two of them his guide as he avoids this maid-turned-killer’s blows.

Her expression is fierce, her jaw set firmly and her full lips twisted into a snarl. Her movements are lithe and intuitive but unpracticed. Her knife lands in the armoire behind where his shoulder had been moments earlier with a thud. She tries to pull it out but the blade has dulled enough that it sticks, giving Levi an opportunity to get behind her.

He grabs her arms and pins her to the ground with his knee between her shoulder blades. It takes all of his weight and force to pin her down as she struggles and grunts, kicking her legs to get him off of her.

“Let me go!”

“Yeah, right, so you pull another knife that you’ve hidden up your ass or something and stick it in my heart like that fucker over there.”

She growls angrily and attempts to pull her wrists apart. Levi feels sweat beading on his brow and his forearms tremble at the force of her resistance. It takes both of his hands to keep her wrists together and he knows he’s only succeeding because he has more leverage than she does. The struggle sends a thrill through him and makes him want her to keep struggling so he can see if she can best him.

“The fuck is a maid doing killing noblemen?”

“I had a bad day and he tried to cop a feel,” she grits out sarcastically. He can’t help but laugh.

_Who the fuck is this girl?_

“Yeah well, sucks for him. Look, I was going to kill you, but with all the racket we’ve been making the last couple of minutes I can guarantee we’re gonna have servants up here like rats on garbage sooner rather than later, so if you don’t mind,” he glances over his shoulder at a gargoyle out the window, its thick, stone face easily sufficient for grappling to, “I’m gonna get my ass out of here before that.”

He fires the cable through the glass window and momentarily relaxes his body in preparation for the jerk when the hook lands.

Levi tucks his chin to his chest and uses his shoulder to break through the remainder of the window, the glass shards cutting superficially at his face. He spares one last glance at the maid from his rooftop perch as she stands up and shakes her wrists, her eyes alight with fury as she looks at him from inside the now destroyed chamber.

Levi is certain that this won’t be the last time he sees her. He feels it in the night air, feels it in her slate grey eyes but even more deep down inside of him where his intuition resides, the part of him that always knows what needs to be done.

He flings himself into the night air, silent and sure as he retreats back to his place below.


	7. Chapter 7

The mirror in his bedroom won’t hang straight no matter what he does. Levi grits his teeth while he cleans the cut on his face with rubbing alcohol. None of the cuts is concerning, but if he doesn’t want them to get infected he has to keep them clean.

The first thing he’d done after his big pay day was replenish medical supplies. He doesn’t make a habit of getting injured, but he puts it upon himself to be prepared to do the basics and a little more if need be.

A few years back he’d gotten hit by a bullet in the leg. Fortunately it hadn’t hit the bone or anything major, but stitching it up had been a bitch and a half. He could probably do a better job now, but how else do you learn if not practice?

He changes the bandage and inspects his handiwork. Satisfied, he sighs and falls back into his bed, the old frame squeaking under his weight.

Boredom is not something Levi is accustomed to. Boredom is a luxury. Boredom is for those above who don’t need to scrape and scramble to survive.

The payday for the Inocencio job had been double what he had anticipated. It was so much money that he had almost felt nervous; there can’t be that many people in Mitras with that kind of liquid capital. All he knows is that, whoever the client was, he doesn’t want to be on his bad side. Money is power in a world of people who can be bought at the right price, and this person has a lot of it.

So, for the first time in his grown life, Levi is bored. He’s not pushing his luck with any more hits this month, not when he doesn’t need them to get by, and his recurring jobs like guarding One-Eye and collecting rent don’t take nearly enough time to keep him occupied.

He pulls out his pocket watch (a souvenir he’d grabbed a few years ago off some dead goldsmith) and checks the time. Ari should be coming by soon with an update on the neighborhood.

And his chronic ailment.

His feeling about the maid had been right. She’s been tailing him for the last week.

Levi recalls how pale her skin had been, far too light for an above-grounder who regularly sees sunlight, so it’s no surprise she lives down here, too. It’s unsettling that someone that lethal had escaped his notice completely.

More than unsettling, it’s impossible. Unless she simply sprouted up out of the ground a born killer one day, it’s impossible. Stranger still, her face is familiar to him. He can’t place it, but he remembers her face from somewhere.

Levi shakes his head. He’s being silly. If he’d seen her somewhere before, there’s no way he’d forget it, with a look like that he’d have to remember. The way she’d looked at him, whatever had passed between them — it was too much to forget. She was different from others. Different the same way he is.

He’d seen it in her eyes right away, that the same, tumultuous strength that slumbers inside of him is shared with her.

Levi frowns and irons one of his four shirts for the fifth time that day. Why the hell she’s following him around now is as good anyone’s guess.

Even worse than the maid is the conversation he had overheard that night. A sick feeling has settled itself permanently in his stomach. It’s not hunger, it’s not pain, but rather a twisting, unsettled feeling of foreboding that he can’t shake, no matter how many cups of tea he drinks or halfway decent meals he eats.

It’s not unlike the feeling he gets when he’s being lied to, but it’s constant and doesn’t come from any specific individual. It comes from the very air he breathes.

_What if I told you that things aren’t as they seem? That we’re all living in a strange dream, right now? There are secrets all around us, in the air we breathe, in the ground we walk upon, in the walls that protect us._

He’s tried over and over to dismiss it as rich person bullshit fed by whatever Inocencio had snorted that night for a good time, but it was more than that. It was sounded real, but more important, Levi knows that the words were true. Upon hearing them, something inside of him has been off, his perception skewed by a dead man’s ramblings.

_What the fuck was he talking about? What secret bullshit is this?_

Levi doesn’t think much on the walls. All he knows is that inside them fanatics worship them and outside of them mindless giant-fucks wander around eating suicidal soldiers. All he cares about is the walls keep the sane people safe inside.

_Whatever safe means._

While Levi has never considered himself _safe_ at any given moment of his life, at least he’s not worried about being picked up and devoured. Perhaps it’s a privilege he takes for granted.

Inocencio had, in his last moments, rambled about becoming a king, that the Scouting Legion was going to make him one. Did he and that woman inadvertently prevent a coup? And who the hell had given her her orders? There’s no way she’d decided to pass as a maid and kill a powerful nobleman out of a passing fancy. Someone else had to have asked her to do it.

_So two parties wanted this guy dead._

There’s no way Inocencio had simply been a mad man. People don’t pay tiny fortunes to kill rambling lunatics. People pay to kill threats.

Levi is pulled from his reverie at a knock on the door. It’s Ari, his coat stuffed almost comically with what is certainly the last of his payment. Levi quickly ushers him inside and shuts the door behind him.

Ari takes off his coat and sighs.

“Well, here’s the last of it,” the boy sighs as he opens the false liner of his jacket and puts the tightly bound stacks of bills onto the table. “It sure is something.”

Levi wordlessly grabs two stacks and slides them toward Ari.

“Here, take this.”

  
“You already gave me my cut!”

“You’ve had to take more trips to the surface for this amount, that’s more risk of exposure for you each time, so you should be compensated appropriately. Don’t argue with me or I’ll reconsider.”

Ari’s face sours and he glares at him. “Fine, sheesh, don’t have to tell me twice.”

Levi crosses his arms and leans on the kitchen table.

“What’s going on in the neighborhood?”

“Umm,” Ari rocks back and forth on his heels a little nervously, “It’s quiet. Almost too quiet, especially for it being right after the taxman comes through. I’d expect more fights.”

_It’s a good time to lie low then._

“You can head out, get your ma something for her tremors with that extra cash, alright?”

Ari’s cheeks warm a little but he quickly scowls to cover his gratitude. “Don’t tell me how to take care of my own ma!”

“Hey, one more thing,” Levi says, stopping Ari on his way out. “Do I still have my shadow tagging along?”

“Oh, right, I forgot! Yeah, she’s hiding up on a rooftop right now, the northwestern facing one with the rotting orange shutter,” Arie says as he adjusts his jacket.

Levi frowns. It’s just as he suspected: She’s out there waiting for him to go on and do whatever he’s got planned for the rest of the day. It irritates him. He thought she would’ve left him alone by now or gotten bored. Unless she has orders from someone to tail him, in which case they’re going to have issues.

Ari leaves and Levi readies himself to go take care of One-Eye. He picks up his switchblade, a nice one he pilfered off a wine merchant who probably never used a knife in his life,  and flings it open.

He decides to sharpen it. When deadly women are stalking you for unknown reasons, you can never be too prepared.

.

.

Mikasa clenches and unclenches her hand for what is surely the thousandth time this morning. The rooftop is uncomfortable, but it’s easy to lean her back up against a thick column of rock. It hasn’t escaped Mikasa’s notice that this is one of the few places in the Underground City that isn’t easily accessible from a police watchtower. There are fewer buildings here on the outskirt, and it’s relatively close to an entrance to the surface. Overall, it’s a perfect place to take up residence if you’re one of the few who has business both above and below. Someone like her charge.

Well, charge isn’t the best description. It’s closer to an obsession.

Kenny hasn’t given her any instructions on what to do next. He seemed pleased that she’d taken care of Inocencio, though not necessarily relieved, a slight tension about him that doesn’t quite leave.

Mikasa hasn’t told him about the encounter she’d had with the man in the Lord’s chambers. It feels too much like a secret, an encounter of an almost surreal quality that replays over and over in her mind. When she closes her eyes she can see his gaze, cold and chilling yet setting her very being aflame. His strength was startling, an immovable force that even she couldn’t bend to her will. She’s uncomfortable with that because she knows what it is to be weak and powerless, impotent and unable to change her own circumstance. And she’ll never go back to that.

Kenny may be her new master, but he has given her the ability to control the world around her in a way that she never has before, and with that she’s tasted freedom unlike anything she’s known before.  

Mikasa has stumbled into a world of many secrets. Secrets that once remained hidden deep inside of her, strength untold and power that pushes her forward to do what she must, and yet she doesn’t understand any of it, simply feels it. Then there are secrets about the world, too, of kings who only seem to be kings and hidden queens. For the first time in the last few months she wonders if being a spider who preys on flies really means anything at all.

But this man she’d fought, he sends a strange thrill through her, that when they fought she’d felt something come alive that she’d once thought dead. She feels drawn to him in a way that is uncomfortable, his strength a bright flame that she can’t help but gravitate toward.

She doesn’t know what she expects to come of following him. She doesn’t know if she’s looking for a fight or a conversation, or even just a look at him again, but it makes her feel a strange pull that she can’t shake.  

The young boy who often visits the man leaves, so Mikasa suspects that the man will leave for his daily business soon, so she jumps down off of her perch and finds an alleyway that’s closer.

The man leaves his house, locking all three of his locks fastidiously and placing his keys in his pocket like he does every time he leaves. He’s dressed well in a white shirt and a vest that are neat and tidy with no rips or stains— uncommon traits down here in the Underground, both by virtue of clothing’s expense and the general disrepair of the streets.

His expression is solemn yet bored, nothing like he’d been up in the Lord’s chambers, his eyes ablaze with a coldness that burns, his body tense and roiling with power as he’d held her wrists together while she’d struggled against him.

She would wonder how he hides it, how he restrains such strength and emotion under such a cool facade if she didn’t do it herself. It’s still strange to observe in another.

He turns from his front porch and looks directly at her, his eyes meeting with hers. Her hair stands on end and her heart starts to pound in her chest, so much so that she can hear it in her head. He doesn’t look away from her the whole while, each step he takes toward her tethering her to her spot in the alley.

He pushes her up against the wall roughly, his brow furrowed and his mouth a snarl when he hisses, “What are you doing following me? Who hired you?!”

Mikasa doesn’t speak, instead she looks down at him, feels his rough hands on her shoulders as they push her into the brick wall behind her. It’s that same feeling she’d had that night, a thrill that she’s never experienced before.

“Answer me or I’ll start acting rude,” he says dryly, producing a silver switchblade from his pocket.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” she says lightly before she puts her foot behind his ankle and jerks it forward, causing him to stumble and upset his balance enough that she can take the opportunity to break away from him. He fumbles with his switchblade, irritated and clearly surprised at being bested until he puts it away, his earlier anger replaced with restraint.

“Fine,” he kicks the ground and shoves his hands into his pockets, “we’re not doing that. It’s pointless anyways, isn’t it?”

Her stomach turns, though she can’t quite discern if it’s from discomfort or excitement at his acknowledgement of her skill.

No, it’s more than that. He feels what she does, that strange sameness about the both of them that she can’t shake, the feeling that settled itself deep into her stomach and drove her to following him around for the last week.

Mikasa adjusts her dress from where his grip had rumbled it and runs a hand through her cropped hair.

“Still, tell me who hired you, if you’re tailing me for some police scum I’ll—”

“No one hired me,” she interrupts. His frown deepens.

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true!” she insists.

She searches for the words but can’t find them. She’s spent years spinning lies, weaving perfect fantasies of enchanted evenings and loving touches, but for whatever reason it all comes up short now in front of him. For whatever reason, she can’t lie to him.

His eyes widen slightly, a moment of shock apparent in his expression before he wills it away, replaced with indifference.

The words are there, she wants to ask him flat out if he felt what she had that night. He has to have felt it. She knows he did, she remembers it in his eyes, in the way he’d looked at her from upon the rooftop before he’d flown away into the night.

Even the memory of it is overwhelming her. Standing here in a dank alleyway in his presence she feels a twisting, sick sensation in the pit of her stomach. She takes one last look at him, his dark hair falling into his eyes as he looks up at her with a frown before she runs away, pushing past him and down the street. She weaves through alleyways and doesn’t take a direct path, but she knows that he isn’t following her after a few blocks.

Mikasa stops and catches her breath behind a rock column, the rough stone surface cooling her flushed skin. Her chest feels tight and her heart is still racing from the encounter.

She slams her closed fist against the rock and curses under her breath. She’s acting a fool, and over someone she doesn’t even know the name of, no less. Still, she hits the rock column twice more and regrets it when her knuckles crack and start to bleed.

She needs to put him from her mind, forget everything she heard in that room that night. It’s for the best.

Mikasa returns to the bunker and rinses her hands clean. While she sharpens her throwing knives to a razor’s edge she thinks to herself that it’s best if she remains alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is shorter next chapter is wild.


	8. Chapter 8

Mikasa spends the next week and a half doing work for Kenny. She kills three men, all different and with no apparent connection aside from wealth and the fact that Kenny wanted them dead. 

Each job is easy and fills her with a sense of pride. They were all powerful men that perhaps would’ve enjoyed a night with her once upon a time. The pleasure she takes from killing should unnerve her, should scare her even, but it feels too good to remember that she’s in control, that she has power that others do not.

Even the rich can be killed if Kenny Ackerman asks for it. 

Thinking the name Ackerman is strange to her. She hadn’t thought of it for so long and almost wondered why it had been so familiar to her before remembering that Ackerman was also  _ her  _ name. Her mother always told her that Mikasa was the name she had given her and that Ackerman was the name her father gave.

Over the years she’d clung so much to Mikasa, tried with everything she could to keep Mikasa alive in her head if nowhere else.Perhaps Mikasa Ackerman is someone different than the Mikasa she’d fought to keep alive, someone deadly.

Still, it’s strange that this is another similarity she has with Kenny, though she doesn’t want to ask him about it. If she is honest with herself, Kenny scares her. She knows her place in this, and while it is better than her life before, it’s still servitude.

Mikasa has tried to clear her mind of the man she’d fought in the Lord’s chambers weeks ago and sometimes she succeeds. 

Other times she doesn’t.

It’s late at night, right before the quiet dawn that doesn’t reach beneath the surface below. She scrubs her skin raw, the blood of her last target difficult to scrape from her nail beds. After she’s satisfied, she kicks her clothes into a lazy heap to deal with in the morning. She lies on her bed and covers herself with a blanket but can’t help but think of that night.

She replays the evening over and over again in her mind with clarity so vivid she thinks she could recite every word said between them aloud. She thinks of Lord Inocencio’s talk of a hidden things, of secrets and illusions before she’d jammed her knife into his heart. She remembers the man’s face looking at her over the dead Lord’s shoulder, his own knife jammed into Inocencio’s back. 

She thinks of the man’s face, of his hands and how he’d grabbed her, of the sweet tension she’d felt between the two of them, the  way his body moved like the wind as he’d dodged her blows. It makes her breath feel short even though she shouldn’t be winded, makes her head spin and her cheeks flush. This bothers her and confuses her, but no matter what she tries the feeling doesn’t leave her. 

She doesn’t know why she ran that day in the alley. She shouldn’t have been afraid, should’ve made him answer her, asked him how he’s so strong and what he was doing there that night, but she just couldn’t and that bothers her. It bothers her a great deal. 

Mikasa falls into a fitful sleep for a few hours. She dreams of birds with tails of fire and waves of water taller than homes. She dreams of rivers that flow endlessly and winds that carry the wings of great flying snakes. The sun and moon shine together in the sky, half of the world shrouded in darkness and the other in light. She sees the man from the Lord’s chambers, his expression calm and cool. His hand reaches for hers, but when she tries to reach for him she wakes with a shout, her heart pounding and her brow sweaty.

She sees Kenny standing over her, a bucket in his hands and a grin on his face.

“I was about to dump this on ya to get yer ass outta bed, but ya woke yourself up with all that yelling. Pleasant dreams?” he jokes. 

She glares at him and pulls the blanket closer to her chest with a sense of modesty she’s surprised she still possesses. Her head is throbbing and feels heavy, but she grinds her teeth and tries to ignore it.

Kenny sets down the bucket carelessly, the water meant for her head splashing onto the floor. He sits down at the table in the middle of the room. 

“Got more work for ya, but it’s a bit different.” 

“I’m listening,” she grits out, trying but failing to sound neutral. 

He sighs and pinches his brow, and for the first time he seems a little nervous about what he’s about to ask of her. 

“I need ya to steal a book from a priest. A Wallist priest.”

Mikasa doesn’t let her surprise show on her face, but she’s surprised no less. The Church of the Walls is highly secretive, and only those of very high nobility are allowed access to its secrets.

Mikasa has gathered that Kenny uses her to do work that would be devastating for someone who works so closely to the monarchy to be caught doing. But this is different than killing nobles and influential merchants. This is a taboo, of forbidden knowledge of something viewed as sacred.

Inocencio’s words ring around in her mind until Kenny interrupts her thought.

“But you can’t kill the priest. You need to just take the book and run.” 

She swallows nervously but nods all the same.

“The book is called  _ The Subjects of Ymir _ ,” he says. The lofty title sounds odd in his roughened manner of speaking. “And it has to be tonight. The book is going back to its primary owner tomorrow, and it can’t be stolen from there, not even by you or me.” 

He throws a black scarf at her.

“Cover yer face with this. Don’t let yourself be seen. If you are seen, ya may as well slit yer belly open because I’ll have no use for ya and you’ll be found.  _ Don’t kill the priest _ .” 

“But why? Why leave the priest alive if it’s so important I’m not seen?” 

He glares at her, a flash of murderous intent so palpable that it makes Mikasa instinctively back away. 

“Don’t ask questions. Do what yer told. Remember, you owe me.” 

She looks away and wrings her hands nervously. She does owe him, and he’s not going to let her forget that anytime soon. A strong, pulling sensation between them unsettles her, but not for the first time she feels that even if she wanted to leave, she couldn’t. Something holds her back here, a strong sense of duty to the man who’d helped her achieve power. 

Mikasa nods wordlessly at his directive. Kenny scribbles down a location on a piece of paper and shoves his hands in his pockets. 

“I reckon it’ll be right on the priest’s bedside table. The place will be crawling with military police, so I recommend sneaking in through the window. The book will be hidden among other books, but it should be thick, red leather with black lettering and old. Very old. Older than anything you’ve seen.” 

He turns to leave.

“Don’t come back if you get caught.”

She doesn’t need this explained to her. She returns unseen, her identity hidden, or she dies. By her own hand or his. 

.

.

It’s a cold and drizzly evening. The light rain doesn’t soak her clothes but promises a downpour later. Mikasa notes her good fortune: a strong storm could provide extra cover for an escape. She feels the empty bag beneath her shirt, the bag for the book that she’s risking her life over. 

She knows breaking in won’t be easy. A tense hum of energy in the air tells her to prepare for the unknown. Her head throbs slightly, but it’s been bothering her all day so she ignores it.

Mikasa thinks briefly about her mother and how she always knew it was about to rain, a sharp sting of sadness that she pushes away as quickly as it came. She adjusts the scarf she has wrapped tightly around her face, concealing her appearance from anyone who may chance a look at her. 

The church is grand and beautiful, with spires that reach toward the sky and beautiful windows that depict elaborate scenes of stained glass. She can see through the candlelit windows as people keep vigil, clearly absorbed in meditation and prayer at all hours of the evening. 

As Kenny warned, Mikasa spies two police details patrolling the streets around the perimeter of the place, and from what she can discern they’re a good bunch. Mikasa watched one shift change, but they are staggered with the other squad so that there is little room for vulnerability in their coverage of the area. 

If she wants to sneak into the high priest’s quarters, she’s going to have a sixty-second window to do it—at best—if she wishes to remain unseen. 

She swallows nervously. The high priest’s quarters are attached to the church. Modest in comparison, it’s two floors and about the size of a small house. 

Mikasa watches the police longer and realizes that they’re something different than the regular ones. Their uniforms are slightly different, fancier somehow and their maneuvering gear also appears different. Normally she doesn’t consider any of them a threat, but these ones are different. They carry themselves well and seem more authoritative than the usual corrupt bunch that patrols the Underground. 

It’s late. The clock on the church has struck half past three in the morning but she’s not tired. She sees the replacement guard approaching, about to hand off material and pass on information for the new group. The second group is an entire street’s length away from the window she needs to climb into. 

The rain begins to fall harder. While visibility is reduced her sounds will be muffled, she notes. Now’s the time. She quiets her mind and focuses on what needs to be done, willing her body forward as she leaps across the alleyway and to the window ledge. 

Her heart pounds in her chest but her hand doesn’t shake as she unlatches the window and sneaks inside, shutting the window behind her. 

She finds herself in a sitting parlor with two red cushioned chairs and a gameboard set up between the two of them. There’s a heavy wooden door with iron hinges that leads into what Mikasa assumes is the High Priest’s sleeping quarters. 

The room is far less austere than she would’ve imagined, littered with gems and baubles. The evening’s fire is still bright and full of logs, suggesting a servant has come up to tend to it in the middle of the night to keep the room warm. 

This bodes well, she thinks: It implies the High Priest sleeps deeply. 

She is quiet, hardly breathing as she turns the doorknob into the Priest’s bedroom. Moonlight streams in through a window, illuminating the room quite clearly. His priestly garb is hung up on the outside of the armoire, along with weighty jeweled chains with rubies set into gold with black garments beneath.

The priest himself lies on a large bed in the corner of the room. He doesn’t look very priestly at all—undignified, his mouth open, drool crawling past his lips as his snores echo throughout the room. 

There are two bookshelves that Mikasa immediately investigates.

She inspects the spine of each book and finds only religious texts, stories of the walls, prayer books, hymnals—nothing like what Kenny had described to her earlier. 

She needs to find it, but she can’t wreck the room looking for it; even the heaviest of sleepers can be woke. 

Mikasa glances over the bookshelves one last time to be sure before she creeps slowly towards the priest.

Her stomach lurches when she sees, wrapped up in the priest’s arms, a red leather-bound book with black leathers creeping out from where his hand obscures the title. The room is dark, but Mikasa knows that this is it, the book she’s been tasked to take. 

All snuggled up with the priest. 

She holds back a sigh. Of course it is. 

Mikasa grabs what she thinks is a similarly sized book off the shelf carefully before she approaches the sleeping priest. Carefully, she begins to push the book from his grip, using the gentlest fingers she knows to have to softly pry his grip from the book. Surely enough, the title is revealed:  _ The Subjects of Ymir _ . Her heart skips a beat. She feeds the replacement book, a hymnal for the springtime, into his grip as she pulls the red leather book free from his grasp. 

The Priest snorts loudly. If Mikasa were of a weaker constitution, she might have fainted. She steps back quickly, watching him the whole while as he stretches, then flips over onto his side and continues to snore even louder. Mikasa puts the book into her bag and backs away slowly. 

And that’s when she sees it. 

A brown leather book, thick and large but weathered and worn. It looks old, at least as old as the book she just took. There are no words on the spine but instead a symbol. A familiar symbol. One she has looked at every night for over a decade. The one branded onto her arm, a raised white scar that remains the only connection she has to her old life. 

_ Mother.  _

Seeing it somewhere else pulls at her, filling her with a sense of longing for the past so poignant that it stings. The book is beneath a stack of many others, and she knows that she needs to go. She should quit while she’s ahead; the longer she lingers the greater chance of being caught. 

But she can’t bring herself to go. There’s a piece of the mother who’d been taken from her far too soon sitting there on that table, hidden away in this church with an untold number of other secrets. She has to take it.

She carefully and quickly moves the books, setting them down quietly before she takes the fragile brown book and puts it into her bag, along with  _ The Subjects of Ymir.  _

Mikasa glances over at the priest nervously, but he’s still dead asleep. She carefully opens the heavy wooden door, back to the parlour where she’d snuck in. 

Only to see a young boy in drab brown robes stoking the fire. They stare at each other for a moment, his eyes scared and wide as he takes her in.

“INTRUDER! INTRUDER!” he screams before Mikasa can stop him. 

Mikasa launches herself out the window, any pretense of stealth gone with her haste. She can still hear the boy screaming after her out the window. 

She runs down an alleyway, and three military police drop in front of her. She turns around to head the other direction, but there’s two more are behind her. One of them is tall, and when he looks down at her, the shadow of his face no longer obscured by the brim of his hat she has to hold back a gasp.

“Well, well, well, what have we got here?”

She sees a glimmer of excitement in Kenny’s eyes when he looks at her. To his right is the blonde woman named Traute she’d fought a while ago in the bunker. Her expression is smug, her hand resting on her hip and a gun holstered in her other. 

“Give back what you took and we’ll let you on yer way,” Kenny says. 

Traute and the others behind her laugh at the lie. There’s no way they’re letting anyone go, and they all know it. 

Kenny wanted this to happen. He needed this confrontation to happen, because for whatever reason, he can’t be suspected of wanting this book. 

Mikasa doesn’t speak. She flings herself backwards, grabs the smaller cop standing behind her so quickly he doesn’t even have time to scream before she slams his head into the brick wall, his skull caved and misshapen as she lets him fall to the ground.

The other one fires his gun at her but misses. She takes the opportunity, ducking her way beneath his outstretched arm and grabs his forearm, one hand on each side. She swings him hard one way and then jerks him suddenly the opposite way to disorient him before she wraps her hand around his and fires his gun three times into his comrade. The aim is off as he struggles, but she landed at least three hits to the abdomen. 

Mikasa hears the gunshot from the other end of the alley and her body moves before she thinks, pulling the struggling MP in front of her as a shield, the bullets landing with sharp thuds into his chest. 

She lets his body drop to the ground unceremoniously and stares at Kenny and Traute down the alley for a moment, Traute’s still smoking gun raised in front of her and ready to fire again.

_ She probably has two more rounds in the chamber before she needs to reload that one.  _

If Mikasa runs, Traute and Kenny will chase her, and while Kenny doesn’t actually want to kill her, she’s certain that Traute does. 

She zigzags forward as Traute fires twice more, each bullet missing and ricocheting off the pavement leaving leave streaks of gold sparks in the moonlit alley. 

“Fuck!” Traute hisses. Mikasa pulls out her knife and slashes across Traute’s torso but Traute pulls away quickly. The slash blooms red and bold on her white shirt, but Mikasa knows that it was too shallow to inflict meaningful harm. 

Traute lands a punch on Mikasa’s shoulder that knocks her forward into the wall, then lands another to her stomach that winds her before she takes another hit to the head. Mikasa hears the quick reload of the gun, her ears still ringing from the blow.

Mikasa breathes in deeply, allows the world to reorient itself before she crouches down and explodes upward, swinging her entire body as she kicks Traute in the head, the force of it launching Traute into Kenny. Kenny stumbles backwards at the force of the blonde woman’s weight. 

Mikasa runs. She runs harder and faster than she ever has, the gentle rain from earlier now a downpour. She hears two gunshots fire. It isn’t until she sees herself start to bleed that she realizes she’s been hit, once in the shoulder and once in the thigh. 

She cries out in pain as blood gushes thick, hot and red from her shoulder. She stumbles but manages to keep going, but not before she looks over her shoulder and sees Kenny standing there, fifty meters away with his smoking gun and grinning face looking at her. 

She gasps and presses on her shoulder harder, as if somehow she can stop the blood with her other hand. Her leg is throbbing, her blood staining the pavement and mixing with water as it drains down the gutter.

She has to run, needs to get away, but she’s already getting lightheaded from the blood loss and the pain. 

_ No, this isn’t it.  _

She can still move, so she can still run. Kenny won’t chase her. He’s done more than enough to keep up appearances. 

The entrance to the Underground isn’t far. She pushes herself forward, makes herself run. She has to run if she’s going to live. 

_ One more step. One more step. _

She lies to herself this way, each time only willing herself to move just once more.

She stumbles down the pathway underground, trailing blood and water dripping from her clothes the whole while. Her leg isn’t nearly as bad as her arm, but the bleeding in her arm has hardly slowed. She guesses that she has only a few minutes before she passes out. 

_ Keep moving. Don’t think about that.  _

Her vision is blurring by the time she makes it below and she knows that if she passes out here on the street she’s a goner. The bunker is at least a kilometer away and she’ll never make it that far. 

Then she sees it. She’s not sure if it’s actually bright or if her mind is playing tricks on her, but she knows it’s where she needs to go, pulled there by an instinct to survive. She pulls her scarf off of her face, letting it fall to the ground as she stumbles forward.

She slams her uninjured shoulder into the door, one hand too busy trying to stem the blood flow on her shoulder and her other one unable to move.

Mikasa slams her body into the door desperately, each time getting weaker and weaker.

_ Please answer. Please.  _

He has to come to the door. 

Her blood is dripping onto the doorstep. Somewhere distant she hears a voice from inside  the house but she can’t make out what it says.

She falls on the door, panting from exertion, unable to hold her weight up anymore as she hears the door being unlocked from the inside. The door opens and she falls forward with it and into the arms of the man from the Lord’s chambers.

He looks down at her, his initial shock and confusion disappearing when their eyes meet. 

“Please,” she breathes, her vision starting to blur. 

No matter what she’s thought in the past, faced with the prospect now, she knows she doesn’t want to die. 


	9. Chapter 9

“Please.”

In his arms she’s heavier than he would’ve expected. Perhaps it’s because she’s half-dead at this point. Levi doesn’t think before he carries her inside and puts her down on his bed, her shoulder wound oozing blood the whole while. She’s been gripping it tightly this whole time but the bleeding doesn’t seem like it’s slowing. 

Quickly he grabs a bottle of One-Eye’s alcohol that he keeps on hand and dumps it on his knife. After it’s sufficiently clean, he puts the blade in the flame of the lamp. While it heats, he takes a look at the bleeding woman in his bed. Her eyes are closed, but her hand still grips her shoulder tightly. She’s pale and soaking wet, her hair darkened to black from water and plastered to her forehead. Her blood is everywhere, splattered on her rain soaked body. Her expression is pained, her slight brow furrowed and jaw clenched. 

Panic wells up inside of him, a foreign, unwelcome intruder in his normally detached demeanor. He doesn’t know why, but he knows if she dies here in his house he’ll feel it for the rest of his life. Everything inside of him cries out to help her, to fix her, to save her. 

Why he cares so much about a complete stranger he can’t even begin to understand, but Levi never ignores his gut, so he sets himself to work. 

He cuts open the bottom of her shirt without asking her, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Beneath the shirt is a bag that he tosses aside carelessly with a _ clunk  _ sound. He moves her hand momentarily to take off her shirt and the blood flows even more freely without the pressure of her hand. By the time he’s cut away her sleeve, all of his bedding has been stained. 

Levi grabs the clear grain alcohol and pours it over the wound. She lets out a low groan. At that he takes off his belt. He pulls down on her chin to open her mouth.

“Bite on this,” he says shortly putting the leather into her mouth. She does so, weakly gritting her teeth on the leather. 

He takes the knife out from the flame. It’s hot, but not so hot that it is red or white, and presses the flat of it to the wound. The smell of burning flesh fills the room the whole while he works but he pays it no mind. To her credit she doesn’t yell, merely bites down on the belt and groans. 

The bleeding seems to have slowed on her shoulder, so he focuses on the leg wound. It’s bleeding less, but there’s a bullet lodged in the muscle.

“This needs to come out,” he says. She looks down at him, eyes delirious and forehead sweating, and she nods slightly to him. 

With that, Levi grabs a pair of pliers and cleans them with the alcohol. He bears down on her leg with his forearm hard in case she starts to kick, and digs into the wound. 

This time she screams, her voice cracking and pained as she clenches the bedding in her fist.  She grits her teeth and manages to hold her body still. 

Levi’s stomach isn’t turned easily, but the bullet is deep in her thigh muscle and it’s less than pleasant, even for him. He gives up on trying to ease it out and instead digs into the muscle and pulls hard. She shouts in agony, her voice thin and reedy as she tries and fails to keep quiet. He feels overwhelmed with pity that’s foreign to him at her pain. 

With a sigh on his own end, he finally gets the bullet out. 

“There, worst of it’s done,” he says more to himself than to her. He pours more alcohol on the wound, blood flowing freely from it, though not nearly as badly as her shoulder wound had been, so he thinks he can get by with just applying pressure for a while to get the bleeding to stop. 

Her head has lolled to the side and he thinks she’s passed out. 

“Hey, wake up,” he says sharply but she doesn’t respond. 

That’s not good, he can’t let her sleep until he’s finished this up.

“Wake up!” he repeats, snapping his fingers in front of her face. When that doesn’t work he slaps her on the cheek.

Her eyes flutter and she looks at him, her eyes tired and expression somewhat dazed.

“No sleeping until I have this stitched up,” he says shortly. 

She just moans in response. It’s good enough for him. Upon examining the wound, it seems like it’s stopped bleeding enough that he can start to stitch. He grabs some thread and a curved needle, dips it again in alcohol and sighs before he decides he needs a drink himself. He takes a pull off the bottle of white liquor and he shivers as the liquor burns hot down his throat. How people drink this shit regularly he’ll never know. 

“You’re going to tell me what got you in this kind of shape, it’s the least I deserve after all of this mess,” he says, glaring at her. 

“Sure,” she mumbles, her body starting relax a little. He begins to stitch the wound. Her muscles twitch a little involuntarily, but other than that she sits there motionless, fighting exhaustion the whole while. 

“There,” he says, tying off the thread and wiping his brow, “I’m not a seamstress so it’s not pretty but it’ll work.” 

“Thank you,” she says. She reaches toward his hand and weakly squeezes it, an innocent gesture of gratitude that makes him need to fight the urge to pull away. For whatever reason, he lets her hold his hand until she falls asleep. 

He stays there like that for what could be minutes or hours, listening to her breathe. 

Why she came to him he doesn’t know, but perhaps it’s the same unknowable reason that he’d needed to save her. Levi doesn’t bother himself with things like fate. The idea normally makes him roll his eyes and think of sad, gossiping people with no better way to rationalize their shitty lives. 

But one thing Levi does believe in is himself, his choices, and chance. He’d needed to help her, so he did. 

Levi cleans her with the cleanest rags he has, the blood on her skin turning the water in the bucket a dark pink that borders on red. He does his best to preserve her dignity, leaving her undergarments in place. Once he’s done a satisfactory job, he takes her bloody clothes and throws them in the heap out back. 

Levi goes out to the shower, a small little wooden shack shared by the block and turns on the water. It comes out reddish, the iron in the pipes having colored it as it sat there stagnant. When it turns relatively clear, he steps in and turns the water as hot as it will go.  It’s so hot that it turns his skin turns red as the nameless woman’s blood swirls pink down the drain. 

He scrubs himself with harsh soap, his chest, his forearms, beneath his fingernails until he’s got nothing left of the woman’s life trapped on his body. 

He stands there like that for a while, resting his forearm on the shower wall, letting the water hit his back for an amount of time that is nothing short of wasteful. He doesn’t care how much he’ll have to pay on the meter later, he has the extra cash to go around.

_ I don’t even know her name.  _

But he knows her face. He’s seen her somewhere before, be it in his dreams or in the real world but he can’t place exactly where. 

There’s no way that this is all an elaborate ruse for a hit. If she’d wanted him dead, she would’ve made a move for it earlier. So  _ why  _ did she come to him? 

He turns off the water and towels himself off. It’s morning now, and his neighbors are starting to wake and go about their business. He pulls on his clothes and goes inside. 

The woman is still asleep, her breathing light but steady. He’s done everything he can, now all that’s left is to wait.

.

.

Mikasa wakes slowly. Her mouth is dry, as if it had been packed tightly with cotton and her body aches all over. 

The room she’s in is modest and tidy. The walls are painted a pale blue color that reminds her of the sky up above ground. The plaster on the ceiling is only cracked a little around the modest light fixture; an unlit gas lamp that hangs from above. On the bedside table is another lamp, the only source of light in the room.

She moves to rub her eyes but her shoulder throbs in protest. She’s dressed in nothing but her undergarments and the bedding around her is still slightly damp with her blood. All the same she props herself on her forearms carefully and leans against the headboard of the bed, the effort of this alone leaving her winded. 

Everything from last night rushes back to her; the books, the MPs she’d killed, the shootout, Kenny wounding her and then crawling back to the underground. 

_ And the man from the Lord’s chambers.  _

The thought of him turns her stomach in a way she can’t put words to, an uncomfortable yet curious sensation that she can’t shake. As if summoned by her thoughts, the door opens and there he is, dressed in dark pants, a white shirt and a burgundy vest. 

“You’re awake.” 

He walks over to the bedside, pulls up a chair and sets a glass of water on the bedside table. She grabs it with her good arm and gulps all of it down in one go. She’s still thirsty enough that she wouldn’t turn down another. Instead, he hands her a hunk of bread wordlessly that she tears into.

“Thank you,” she says after she finishes, but he says nothing back. Instead he looks her up and down, as if he is studying her, trying to draw some sort of conclusion and still coming up short. 

He leans back on his chair and crosses his arms. The silence between them is deafening, a strange tension between the two of them that Mikasa finds both thrilling and uncomfortable. 

“What happened last night?” 

She thinks about lying, about saying that she was caught in the crossfire of a terfwar down below but she knows that he wouldn’t believe it. Not only because she’d taken a bullet to the leg and guns are an illegal liability for citizens to possess, but because she knows that she can’t deceive him properly. There’s something different about him, a perceptive quality to him that makes her feel almost naked. 

“Last night I stole a book for my…” she searches for a word to describe what Kenny is to her but can’t find anything that fits. “I stole a book but got held up by the police when I was getting away.” 

“That’s not the whole of it,” he accuses, “regular cops don’t carry guns like the one that stuck that bullet in your leg, and big time cops don’t chase women stealing library books, so I suggest you fill in the blanks, now.”

_ Damn it.  _

She should’ve known that he’d see through even a half truth. 

When she doesn’t speak, he grabs her black bag and pulls out  _ The Subjects of Ymir  _ and opens it to the first page. Her heart jumps into her throat when he holds it over the open flame of the lamp. 

“If you don’t explain, I’m going to burn this book you got shot twice over. Page by page.”

If she loses that book, after all of this, she knows that she may as well have just died last night.

“Alright, stop! Just put the book down!” 

He sets the book in his lap, hand still clenched firmly around it as if she had the strength to take it from him now. He looks at her expectantly.

“That book...it’s from the Church,” she says quietly.

His eyes widen in shock and he stands up, tossing the book onto the bed. He runs a hand through his hair and curses under his breath, his body tense with barely contained fury.

“I don’t need this bullshit, I don’t fuck with the church and whatever shit they pedal to the masses, and now you’ve gone and brought it into my house,” he hisses, “I should’ve let you die, I should’ve let you bleed out on my doorstep!”

“But you didn’t.” 

Her words hang in the air between them. He looks at her, expression no longer angry but softened to somber confusion. He sits back down in the chair and pinches his brow.

“No,” he says, just barely louder than a whisper, “I didn’t.”

They look at one another, a strange feeling that she can’t name passing between the two of them. She knows that he feels it too, an odd, almost content feeling that she hasn’t felt in a very long time. 

“What’s your name,” he asks her gruffly.

It’s odd they’ve gotten to this point without saying their names, but something about it is difficult for Mikasa. Perhaps it’s that she still isn’t used to saying her own name aloud, still used to performing a role for those around her. Or maybe it’s the fact that when she says her name it’s the beginning of something that she’s not quite sure she will be able to stop. 

“My name is Mikasa,” she says, “what’s your’s?” 

He hesitates before he answers.

“It’s Levi.” 

She feels a strange sense of relief at this information. It’s nice to put a face to a name. She smiles wearily and grabs the heavy red leather book, pulling it into her lap. 

“I’m sorry, Levi, for bringing you into this.” 

Even if part of her is starting to think more and more it was inevitable that their paths cross again she means it. 

She opens the book to the first page, a blank flyleaf, “but since I have, it’s only fair that we both see what I nearly died for, isn’t it?” 

He hesitates for a moment, looking from her to the book before he nods. 

The book reads like a story; an odd fairytale whispered by mothers to their restless children at night. It tells of a woman named Ymir Fritz who harnessed a great power inside of her: the power of the titans. But she was not a mindless titan like those outside the walls but rather a living, breathing goddess among them all. 

Upon her death, her powers were split into nine parts, each granting one of her subjects, the race descended from her daughters, the ability to transform into powerful titans at will. 

Humans warred with one another for control of these titan powers, until one man in possession of a titan’s power greater than the eight others fled to an island.

“An island is...a small piece of land?” Mikasa asks, more to herself than to Levi. She’s never heard of such a thing, never thought of a place where land ends and becomes something else. What separates land but more land? 

“I don’t know,” Levi murmurs, his eyes trained on the yellowed pages. 

This man built walls on the island using titans, three of them named for Ymir’s daughters.

“Maria, Rose, and Sina,” Mikasa reads aloud, “those are...our walls...so we must live on an island,” she trails off.

“Forget the names, this just said a  _ person  _ turned other  _ people  _ into  _ titans  _ that turned themselves into the  _ walls!” _

_ There are secrets all around us, in the air we breathe, in the ground we walk upon, in the walls that protect us. _

Mikasa’s throat tightens and her eyes widen. 

“There’s no way this is real, it’s a kid’s book,” Levi says when they finish, his seemingly ever present frown etching itself into permanence. 

“No,” she shakes her head, “this is the truth. Do you remember what you heard that night? In the Lord’s chambers?” 

He shakes his head obstinately.

“That rich fucker? He’s as delusional as the rest of them,” he insists, but Mikasa can tell he’s having a hard time convincing himself. 

“Haven’t you felt off since that night? Like suddenly the world seemed different but you couldn’t place exactly why? That you were being lied to?” she presses. “Well this,” she points at the book, “is crazy. But that’s why it’s the only thing that makes sense.

“If there’s someone in here, in the walls, who can turn into a titan, then why are we still living inside here in fear?”

“...I don’t know,” Mikasa admits, “but the only truth I can discern is that we’ve been lied to.”

“I need to take a walk. You should rest,” Levi says clipply. He stands up and looks at her, eyes cold, aloof and detached, no hint of the kindness he’d shown her earlier.

“The sooner you’re better, the sooner you can leave, the sooner I can pretend that I didn’t know any of this shit and hope that I don’t end up dead. This is dangerous and I don’t want any part in it.” 

“Then why don’t you just throw me out on the street, you’ve already done more than you needed to,” she says cooly. 

“Yeah well, we’ve established that was a mistake already.” 

He leaves the room, letting the door slam shut as he goes. Mikasa sighs and leans back on the headboard, closing her eyes. 

Her exhaustion hits her all at once, her limbs heavy and weak in a way she’s no longer accustomed to. Before she falls asleep, she wonders if islands are just land surrounded by walls.

.

.

 

One-Eye spits on the ground. Her disgusting chew habit never fails to repulse Levi. But today he doesn’t comment on it. His mind is busy with thoughts of Mikasa.

It’s unlike him to pity anyone by virtue of their sex. He is indiscriminate in his regard to lives, man or woman, everyone dies someday. So he knows that her being a woman isn’t why he’d felt compelled to help her. 

Sure, he’d be lying if he said he didn’t notice her beauty. Even half dead and exhausted he’d have to be blind not to notice her smooth skin, thick dark hair and a face unlike any he’s seen before. But Levi has killed beautiful people before, so that’s not the issue. 

No, it’s something else. He can’t place it, but even now after she’s brought the impending wrath of the church upon him, he can’t bring himself to turn her away.

And the nonsense in that book is even worse.    
  


A stumbling drunk get handsy with One-Eye and Levi picks him up and tosses him, kicking and screaming into the trash heap. 

_ Disgusting.  _

He brushes his hands off on his pants and stalks back to One-Eye’s stall.

“You’re quiet today Levi, even for you,” One-Eye says appraisingly. 

“You don’t pay me for conversation.” 

One-Eye glares at him, her one visible eye more than enough to seem threatening and irritated and he sighs. 

“Just thinking about someone I met,” he murmurs.

“Careful, don’t want to be getting all mixed up with a woman, never ends well,” she teases.

“Who said it was a woman?”

“Didn’t need to say, I could just tell,” she winks and Levi glares until she starts to laugh. 

“Alright, alright,” she says, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Levi’s sure that he doesn’t need someone to warn him about anything, he’s well aware of the trouble he’s already in. 

Before he leaves, Levi pays One-Eye for a bottle of white liquor and a salve for wounds. 

“Ya got a big fight coming up or something?” One-Eye rasps.

Levi’s means of employment are no secret down here, but One-Eye is the only person who will casually ask him about it as if he were a simple store clerk.

“I’ve been taking some time off but I need to have supplies on hand, just in case."

“Well here then, take these,” One-Eye says as she pulls out a roll of white cloth, “boiled just yesterday, good for packing wounds. Even folks like you gotta be careful.” 

Her concern would be touching if the part of him that needed such reassurances hadn’t died a number of years ago. Still, he thanks her and pockets the roll of cloth.

Levi takes his time going home, taking the most indirect route possible. He doesn’t want to deal with the truths that lie on weathered pages in his home, and even more he doesn’t want to deal with the still mysterious woman in his bedroom. 

After he’s stopped by the pump station to get potable water, he tires of stalling and heads back home. He mindlessly unlocks the locks to his door, locking them again after he comes back inside. 

The bedroom door is open but he doesn’t feel ready to go in, so he settles for doing exercises in the living area; push-ups, sit-ups, and even a few press-ups on his hands for the hell of it. 

He stops before he works up too much of a sweat.  He grabs some bread and water for Mikasa and goes into the bedroom.

She’s still asleep but stirs at the sound of his footsteps. After a moment or two her eyes flutter open, groggily taking in the room. She struggles to prop herself up against the headboard. 

“Do you think you can stand if I help you?”

He watches her steal herself, her pride clearly on the line while she considers her answer.

“Yeah,” she says tiredly. 

She pales when he slings her arm over his shoulders and stumbles when she tries to put weight on her bad leg, but she doesn’t make a sound, simply grits her teeth and clenches her fist as he guides her over to the chair in the corner of the room. She sits down and hisses at the new pressure on her thigh, but quickly schools her expression to one of indifference. 

Levi takes the bloodied bedclothes and throws them in the corner of the room. Fortunately the actual padding doesn’t seem to be stained, but the quilt and sheets are a loss. He makes the bed with new linens and a simple quilt neatly. 

He glances over at Mikasa when he’s finished and it dawns on him for the first time that she’s only wearing her undergarments. She’s all muscle and smooth skin with lean legs stretching an elegant line from her hip to dainty feet. Her shoulders are broader than most women, but her arms are simultaneously corded with muscle yet delicate. On her wrist is a strange, very intentional looking scar.

Her hair is cropped short and now that it’s dried he can see that it’s more of a dark brown than black. The shape of her eye is odd to him, almost like that of a cat, and beneath the right one is a scar. Other than that and the one on her wrist, her body is otherwise unmarred which he finds strange considering their line of work.  The set of her jaw is firm with her full mouth set in a frown, clearly lost in thought. That strange feeling that he’s seen her somewhere before pulls at him again, but he still can’t quite place it. 

Levi shakes his head.  _ I need to get her some clothes.  _

“We need to clean your wounds,” he says, tone businesslike and detached despite his wayward thoughts. 

She shakes her head, pulled from her thoughts. “Oh, right.” 

He helps her back to the freshly made bed. This time she completely foregoes putting weight on her injured leg and simply hops across the floorboards. Once she has settled herself against the pillows propped against the headboard, he takes his knife and cuts the bandages on her leg. 

The wound is red and swollen, weeping clear fluid as the stitches pull against the inflamed flesh in a manner that looks painful. He dabs at it with a rag and she flinches at his touch, but he pats it dry all the same before he applies One-Eye’s salve. She sighs in relief, the salve seemingly soothing it on contact.

_ Good stuff. _

He bandages her leg and moves on to her arm. He grabs her wrist firmly, looking for any red streaks that could indicate blood-poisoning, because if she has that he may as well not even bother with any of this. Her skin is clear but for the strange mark on her forearm, a circle with a symbol inside of it. It inspires an uncharacteristic curiosity in him but he pushes it aside. 

Levi can feel her eyes on him as he takes off the dressing on her shoulder. He’s thankful that it doesn’t smell and seems to be doing okay. 

“Here,” he hands her the bottle of white liquor he’s been using as antiseptic this whole while, “take a good drink of this. We need to pack this since I had to burn it shut, and it won’t be pleasant.” 

“No, I don’t like alcohol,” she insists and he rolls his eyes. 

“It’s not about the taste, trust me, you’re gonna want something to take the edge off.” 

She frowns even more, biting the inside of her cheek as she grips the neck of the bottle before she reluctantly takes a surprisingly large gulp of the liquor. She clearly took too much, but forces herself to swallow it. 

She gags and coughs, clasping her hand over her mouth as her eyes water and he has to stop himself from laughing at her expense. She reaches for the water and gulps half the glass before she sets it down, her good hand shaking slightly.

_ She could carve up a man in a minute flat but can’t handle a drink.  _

This woman is a strange mess of contradictions. 

“How do people drink that for leisure?” she says after she’s gathered herself. Levi shrugs. 

“People like to forget how shit things are for a bit.”

She frowns, brow furrowed. 

“That was rhetorical,” she sulks, her delicate face twisting into an almost childish scowl. 

After a minute or so her face starts to turn red, far redder than he would think from just a pull off a bottle of alcohol. 

His touch is rough when he cleans the inside of the wound with a cloth-covered  finger tip while Mikasa lets out an impressive stream of curses. Still, she doesn’t squirm away from him while he coats it with salve, packs it with linen and bandages it. 

She’s sweating by the time he’s done. Without thinking twice he takes a rag and wipes her brow. For whatever reason her weakened state fills him with a sense of pity. It seems so wrong that the fierce woman ready to kill him from all those weeks ago be so vulnerable.

He goes through his closet and grabs her a shirt and a pair of old drawstring pants. He helps her put them on and notes that the pants go halfway up her calf.

“Thank you,” she sighs. It’s genuine and fills him with a strange feeling of contentment that he simultaneously enjoys and dislikes. 

“You’re welcome.” 

They stay there quiet like that for a while, a silence between them that is comfortable rather than awkward. She eats the bread he brought and drinks the water. 

“In my bag, there’s another book–”

“What?” he all but growls. This time she glares at him rather than seeming apologetic.

“There’s another book,” she repeats herself, “would you mind bringing it to me?”

“Why do you have  _ another  _ one?”

“This one is personal business,” she says sharply, “besides, dead for one book is the same as dead for two, so how is it any worse that the situation you’re already in?”

Rather than admit she’s right he just gets up and grabs the bag. It’s heavier than he would’ve expected. The book is wrapped in dark leather and larger than the other book she’d stolen, at least double in size. 

The cover has no words, but rather a symbol embossed on the front. The same symbol that seems to be marked on Mikasa’s wrist. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes must have wandered because Mikasa folds her arm to her chest, hiding the mark from him. 

He sets the book on her lap and Mikasa suddenly looks as if she’s about to burst into tears, a prospect that makes Levi extremely uncomfortable. Not only has she endureed more physically in the past day than any normal person should be able to, it’s strange to see her usually stoic expression crumble into sadness so quickly. Her sadness at this book, whatever it means to her, is almost palpable to him, a feeling of grief emanating off of her as her hands shake and trace over the cover.

Part of him wants to leave, the tears now rolling down her cheeks too much for him to bear witness to, but something stops him. She wipes her eyes stubbornly, tears still welling up in her eyes despite her efforts. She shakes her head, her expression resolved and stern once more as she opens the book. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting a bit early because my MIL is visiting tomorrow to help when my husband has his wisdom teeth removed. Really important chapter plot wise and really gets the ball rolling on the rivamika relationship. Please let me know what you thought, from here on it's truly full speed ahead!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A chapter we've all been waiting for. Thank you so much to [@monachusmonachus](http://monachusmonachus.tumblr.com/) for betaing this chapter/line editing it while my husband has been recovering from wisdom teeth extraction. I hope you all enjoyed this, I worked very hard on it!

Mikasa runs her hand over the page. It is thick and fibrous with colorful ink depicting a flying snake with wings, its body twisting and turning with scales that almost look like feathers. The snake’s  mouth is open in a proud roar and a tongue of flame curls up across the page. It melts into the feathered tail of a rainbow colored bird, its wings outstretched as it flies toward the sun. 

It’s just like the stories her mother had told her as a child, of beautiful birds rising from ash and flying beasts, all symbols of their long lost Asian family. She can hear her mother’s voice, all but feel her presence in the room as she holds this book close in her lap. Her fingertips trace the outline of each drawing as if they are somehow imbued with her mother’s essence.

On each page in the right corner is the symbol branded upon her arm and she can’t help but trace it repeatedly as she looks at the page.  

She turns the page, but it’s filled with symbols that she has no understanding of. She assumes this is a kind of writing, but it is unlike any script that she’s ever seen. The thought pains her, that perhaps this is something she would have learned later, had her mother lived longer. 

Mikasa is once again overwhelmed with guilt for her mother’s death. It claws into her chest and sinks itself into her heart, cold and sickening as she holds back her tears. 

If she’d been strong then like she is now she could have done something. If she’d simply fought instead of surrendering she would have been strong like she is now. She knows that this power had always lurked deep down inside of her, but it had taken a monster of a different kind to awaken it. 

_ I’m so sorry, Mother.  _

She takes a shaky breath and remembers that she’s not alone. Mikasa doesn’t know why, but she feels compelled to explain herself. Perhaps it’s because she owes Levi her life and, despite the fact that he’s complained all the while, he’s taken care of her. Or perhaps it’s something deeper than that, a sense of trust and intimacy she has no rational reason to feel with the crass, rude man called Levi.

“I am Asian,” she says quietly, revealing again the mark on her wrist and placing it next to the one in the book, “that’s why I look different from everyone else. That’s why I was brought down Underground.”

Seemingly without thinking, Levi reaches to her wrist and examines the mark with his fingertips. His touch burns on her skin and makes her shiver. His expression is calm and curious as he smooths his index finger over the slightly raised skin of her brand, but, as if coming to his senses suddenly, he quickly pulls away. 

“An Oriental?”

“Mm, that’s another word for it,” she murmurs. 

“I was born in the exterior. When I was a little girl my parents were murdered, my Asian mother by accident...she’d tried to protect me,” she says quietly, tracing her hand over the pages of the book idly, “she was the one they really wanted, since she wasn’t only half like me...all the same, they took me and sold me to a whore house where I lived, then was sold as a commodity for over ten years…”

She doesn’t know why she tells him this, but it feels good for her to speak aloud. He says nothing in light of this information, and for that she is thankful. She desires neither pity nor comforting words, least of all from him. Rather a calmness overcomes her, enough so that she can turn the page. 

Taking up two pages is a map, but unlike any Mikasa has seen before. There are shapes imposed on a blue background. She cannot read the labeling, but next to a small shape there is an illustration of three circles radiating outward. To the east, there is another shape, and inside of it there is the same feathered bird and flying snake, along with the symbol on her wrist. 

Levi and Mikasa look at each other, and back to the book once again.

They are looking at a map of a world outside of the walls. 

.

.

If they were going to be hung for possession of the last book, they were going to be burned at the stake for this one.

A map of a world outside of walls. The thought had never crossed his mind. Years of struggling for survival down here beneath the surface made even the notion of sunlight and fresh water a difficult thing to imagine. Thoughts of an entire world outside of the walls were a fantasy, a dream made for soldiers who valued their lives too little. 

“Do you think that the blue is water? That water separates all of these islands?” Mikasa wonders aloud. 

Levi is not a curious soul, but he can’t take his eyes off the map, his thoughts racing at the prospect of a world he’s never known. 

_ Do they have titans in the other lands? Do they have other people? _

He glances at Mikasa, her foreign seeming features suddenly making more and more sense to him. If the first book is to be believed, they all came from somewhere else. Her features are simply uncommon. 

Mikasa leans back and sighs. Her eyes are red and swollen from crying and her cheeks flushed from the alcohol. She rubs her eyes again, clearly trying her hardest to stay awake.

He grabs the book and closes it gently. “We can look at more of this tomorrow after you’ve slept.”

She sighs wearily. “Yes, that’s probably for the best,” she agrees. 

She looks away for a moment, her expression distant and sad.

Then he remembers with sudden clarity where he has seen her before. Her hair had been long then, a thick plait slung over her shoulder and her full lips painted a dark red, but that expression, that sadness, is exactly the way it’d been years ago when he’d seen her sitting in the window. 

It’s so obvious that he’s stunned he hasn’t realized this until now. He keeps the revelation to himself as she closes her eyes and drifts off to sleep.

Her sadness and what he now knows as grief still unsettles him the way it did years ago, but it’s somehow different now. He’d avoided walking near her window in the past, but now her sadness, her loneliness put on full display captivates him. Perhaps it’s because that, no matter how hard he tries to deny it, it mirrors his own. 

He thinks of Isabel, Farlan, and even Kenny; all three gone, leaving an emptiness inside him. It’s a hollowness that neither pains him nor pleases him, merely a space where histhoughts echo around over and over. 

_ Kenny was at Bauer’s whorehouse the night he was killed...did Mikasa kill Bauer? Did Kenny help her?  _

It’s too odd to be coincidental, and it would explain perfectly how she’d gone from beautiful painted whore lighting candles in a windowsill to lethal, brutal killer over the course of a few months. 

_ Don’t slash like that, you’ll get nothing but air and end up with a knife in yer eye!  _

The harsh lessons he’d learned as a boy are still fresh in his mind, the code he’d learned to live by, a religion of kill or be killed...and being left behind without a word.

He loathes how much it still hurts him, that the man who’d been the closest thing he’d known to a father had abandoned him. 

_ He’s not your father, you have no father.  _

It’s a pathetic thought, to assign a father’s role to Kenny, and even worse the momentary jealousy he feels toward Mikasa at even the possibility of her learning from him.

He looks at her, her expression peaceful in sleep. 

No, he can’t fault her for taking a chance for escape from that life, so he won’t ask her about it. it’s not his business. 

He is growing tired himself. He leans back on the armchair, closes his eyes and crosses his arms, letting his head hang low against his chest. 

_ If  _ she is working for Kenny, if Kenny trained her and commanded her to steal that book from the church, that still raises an important question, one that he doubts even Mikasa knows the answer to.

What is Kenny planning? 

The thought repeats itself over and over in his head, even as he falls into a light half-sleep.

.

.

Mikasa heals at an astonishing rate. After a few days she is up and walking by herself, albeit rather stiffly, and in two weeks Levi can only tell the difference in her gait because he knows she’s injured. Though her wounds surely are still painful, she doesn’t let it show. 

Levi goes about his business during the day, the same as ever.  But when he returns back home, his nights couldn’t be more different.

Mikasa’s presence is something he had initially tolerated out of obligation and guilt, but it very quickly has become something he not only enjoys, but reluctantly craves. She is a stern woman, her demeanor typically stoic and resolute, but it only makes the rare gentleness she exhibits more enjoyable. 

They look through the book together. They must have gone through the whole thing a dozen times by now, but each time he sees something different. Among the maps and symbols he can’t understand are intricate paintings unlike any he’s seen before. Each one is vibrant and depicts creatures he’d never been able to imagine and people dressed in extravagant, layered robes of brocade with sashes tied at the waist. 

“Sit up here tonight,” she says, patting the space beside her on the bed, “I’m tired of craning my neck to show you.”

It’s big enough for the both of them, but not so big he can sit without touching her, so he sits with his thigh pressed against her uninjured one and the book spread over both of their laps. He feels warm, and he knows it has nothing to do with the temperature of the room. 

_ Stop being so childish.  _

The woman was a whore for over a decade, sitting on a bed with a man is likely nothing to her, a matter of convenience. 

They’re looking at his favorite picture in the entire book right now. It is a woman, dressed in a bloodstained robe of vibrant indigo with an orange sash around her waist. Her hair is dark and pulled back with combs of gold that he’s sure is real, judging by the slightly raised texture of the ornaments on the page. On her hip is a scabbard from which she’s drawn a long, thin sword. Her expression is beautiful yet determined as she battles a hoard of monsters, each one different from the other but all equally gruesome with fangs, forked tongues and glowing eyes. 

“I think I was told a story when I was little about this painting, but I don’t remember how it goes,” she says, a barely hidden sadness in her voice, “she’s very beautiful,” she adds, tracing her fingertip over the woman’s face.

“She looks like you,” Levi says without thinking. 

Mikasa looks at him, her eyes wide and her cheeks red as he realizes how that had sounded. His stomach turns oddly in a strange combination of embarrassment and something else he can’t quite place.

“I mean, a lot of people in the book look a little like you,” he amends awkwardly, “they’re your people after all.” 

“Oh, right,” she laughs nervously. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear almost girlishly, the flush on her cheeks doing nothing for his own discomfort. 

He fights the urge to ramble, a foreign desire for him, but simply coughs instead. 

“I think tomorrow I could leave,” she says, changing the subject, “I’m still a bit slow but my limp isn’t too bad.”

The way his chest tightens at her words unsettles him. He’s sad that she’ll leave, and the reminder that even he doesn’t truly want to be alone is frustrating. He should be happy she’s leaving; she’s a burden on him, his livelihood, and has brought nothing but treasonous ideas he could literally be killed for into his home.

No, that’s not entirely true though. Inside of him he feels a strange desire for her, a part of him that simply knows she’s like him, whatever that even means. He sees it in her grief, in her loneliness...he remembers it  in the clench of her fists, the way she’d moved, the way she describes the world around her… It’s intuitive, almost animal, in a way that he didn’t know anyone else could understand. This sameness between them simultaneously terrifies him and makes it so he can’t look anywhere else. 

“But I was wondering if I could leave this book here,” she looks to him, her grey eyes shining in the candlelight of the room, “I don’t want it taken from me, and I don’t know how my boss would react to it.”

He should say no, tell her to take the book or he’ll burn it page by page and bury the ashes out back because it’s a liability, because she’s nothing but trouble in the cruel yet steady way of life he’s carved out for himself. 

But he can’t. 

“Yeah, it’s fine,” he says against his better judgement. 

She smiles, a true, radiant smile, just like the sun that he so seldom sees and grabs his hand in her own. 

“Thank you, Levi,” she squeezes his hand and his heart races. 

He doesn’t say anything back, simply nods and knows that it’s worth it. He doesn’t know why it became like this, doesn’t know exactly when, but he needs to see her again. 

.

.

“Knock like this,” Levi wraps out an odd rhythm on the wall, one long knock, two fast knocks followed by another long one, “so I know when it’s you.”

“Right,” she nods,  _ The Subjects of Ymir  _ wrapped up in her arms, the title facing her chest and covered in a scrap of cloth Levi had.

It feels odd to leave. She’s been here a little over two weeks, and it’s felt like both a long time and no time at all. 

Mikasa stands in front of the door and turns to look at Levi. He’s stuffed his hands in his pockets and looks down at the ground, as if he’s spotted something particularly interesting between the floorboards, his dark hair covering his face. 

“Levi,” she says and he looks up at her.

“What is it?” he asks after a moment and she shakes her head.

“Nothing, I just...I wanted to thank you. Again,” she says awkwardly. She wants to say more but she doesn’t know what. She doesn’t know how to thank the man who bore witness to her guilt, who stitched her wounds and paged through the unreadable stories of her ancestors with her.

He frowns and rolls his eyes. 

“Yeah, don’t get used to it,” he says roughly and she has to stop herself from laughing. 

“Right,” she adjusts her coat one more time, “I’ll be back when I can.”

It’s hard to leave the book behind. It’s started to heal a deep sadness within her, a sadness she hadn’t even been fully aware of until she’d held it in her arms. A shaking, creeping feeling of disconnect at the loss not only of her mother but of her mother’s people who were, in turn, a part of her. One that she’d never allowed herself to fully experience until she’d seen those pictures...and that map of a world outside. It’s like leaving a part of herself here, underneath Levi’s bed.

If she has to leave a part of herself anywhere, with Levi is the safest place. 

She’s never known anyone like him. He is a man made up of more contradictions than she can reconcile; he is brutal, severe, and crass, with words that sometimes sting. He is powerful and she can feel it, the same way she does from inside of herself. He’s every bit the predator that she and Kenny are but, unlike Kenny or even herself, he seems to derive no joy from this fact. 

He walks her to the door in an uncharacteristic show of politeness. 

Beneath his rough exterior he is good in a way she’s never experienced, biting words with a kind touch, stern expressions juxtaposed with silent understanding.

“I’ll be around...by the way,” he says as she starts to twist the door handle, “it’s a good time to lie low right now. I don’t know what your...boss,” he chooses the word carefully, not asking her about further detail, another thing that she feels grateful for, “is gonna want from you coming off that injury, but there’s something big happening above ground. I don’t know what, call me crazy but I can tell something is off.”

Mikasa’s expression softens. He speaks roughly but she can see his concern beneath it, a warning for whatever storm she’s about to weather.

She’s not a fool. She feels it too, can tell that the world is on some sort of precipice.

“I feel it too,” she says quietly, “it’s almost as if...the world is holding its breath, isn’t it?” 

Levi’s eyes widen slightly, likely shocked that someone else has been able to put words to the feeling he has. He nods at her statement. 

“I’ll do the best I can,” she says opening the door, “I’ll see you.” 

She walks back to the bunker in silence, avoiding the more crowded streets of the Underground so as not to attract attention. It’s odd that she feels the same thing he does, but she can’t help but feel a sense of calm fill her. He understands what it’s like to fight everyday, to scrape for survival the same way she does. This dependence, this trust she has in him scares her. She’s never trusted anyone, let alone a man. 

_ It’s practical, not emotional _ . 

She remembers the peace she feels in his presence, the understanding that she shares with him dismisses it as emotions born from convenience. Besides, whatever it is between them, she’s gained an ally.

.

.

Mikasa waits in the bunker for days, holed up with the bare necessities she needs to get by down there. She does as many exercises as her leg and shoulder can stand. She stops herself from rereading  _ The Subjects of Ymir  _ repeatedly, knowing that, if she does read it, it’ll make her go insane. But most of all she thinks of Levi.

She thinks of the way his mouth was always set in a frown, of the way he’d cross his arms and roll his eyes, the way he’d lift her up off the bed and set her on a cushion to change the linens, how he tended to her wounds with a tenderness strange for such a violent man. She thinks of the book, a piece of her heart left beneath the floorboards of his home and how he’d sat by her nights ago, his strong thigh pressed up against hers, his fingertips brushing hers as he turned a page, how he’d fumbled with words as he’d mistakenly called her beautiful...

Mikasa has been told many times, by many men that she was beautiful. She was praised for it even, as if it were some sort of moral quality that distinguished her from others rather than a superficial thing...but even the implication from a man like Levi makes her heart skip, a strange, uncomfortable yet blissful sensation that she’s only read about in storybooks. 

She tries to deny that she misses him, because missing someone is almost like needing someone, and needing someone is a dangerous thing. She’s seen what need can do, an unchecked, volatile thing that can twist and change people...sometimes for the better, but more often than not for the worse.

So she chases thoughts of him away with thoughts of the book, with thoughts of her mother and sometimes her father, because there is no point in trying to deny that she misses them, that she still needs them after all of this time, even though she will never have them back again. 

When Kenny finally arrives, he says nothing to her, an unusual somberness on his face as she meets his gaze. She hands him the book with care. He opens the book right away and begins to read with a fervor she’d never have anticipated, his eyes roving the page with a hunger that is almost alarming. 

He finishes the book, then pages through it one more time before he stows it away in his jacket and looks at her.

“I knew you’d make it back just fine,” he says lightly. This is the closest she’s going to get to both an apology and a thank you for what she’s done. It fills her with an odd sense of pride that he believed in her. 

“Who patched you up?” 

“I went to one of my friends from the whorehouse.”

She doesn’t think twice about lying to him. She doesn’t know why, but she knows that telling him about Levi is a bad idea. Besides, Levi is  _ her  _ secret, the first thing she’s ever had to herself and part of her selfishly wants to keep it that way. 

“Did ya kill her after she took care of ya?”

“No, of course not!” she replies righteously, and he laughs at this.

“Yeah well, ya better got something good on her to make sure she stays quiet, but I ‘spose everyone has to learn these things on their own,” he says lightly, speaking of murder as simply as if it were the price of grain. 

“Ya did good, escaping like that. The four ya took down were some pretty good police, though I’d have been surprised if they’d shown you any meaningful challenge, all things considered,” he continues, “stay off of that leg for a while and stretch out yer arm. Don’t get into any trouble,” he sets a large stack of bills on the table, “no need to draw attention by stealing anything more, it’s obvious yer no good at subtlety,” he teases.

Before he leaves, he turns to her, “by the way,” his expression severe where he’d been almost jovial moments before, “did ya take a read of the book?” 

“A strange children’s story,” She clenches her jaw and attempts to look apathetic though her heart is racing, “I’m not one for books,” she says flippantly. 

He grins that same, murderous, almost hysterical grin she remembers from the night she’d met him. “Well, make sure you don’t go running off anywhere, best be around here three weeks from today,” he frowns and Mikasa has to fight the urge to back away from him, “I have big plans for the future, and your usefulness hasn’t run out yet...if you try to run off...I  _ will  _ kill you.” 

Mikasa knows that this is every bit a promise rather than a mere threat. 

“I have nowhere to run,” she says, the sadness the statement brings her so powerful she can’t keep it completely from her voice, “so you have nothing to worry about.” 

He leaves, though his presence still lingers in the room. She lays down in the small bed, somehow exhausted from the encounter. She pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around her legs. 

She thinks about another life, one where perhaps she had grown up in Asia among people who looked like her, where she hadn’t been a commodity traded and sold to others, or perhaps a world simply where she’d been strong enough to fight her parent’s killers. Her mother would have taught her how to read the strange characters in the book, her father would have continued to make her maple cakes for her birthday.

Mikasa shakes her head. These are all dreams, strange fantasies that she’s used to comfort herself for years. There’s no point to it, because the only life she can live is the one she has.  

Still, she wonders if she tries hard enough that, even for a moment, her dreams could be real. 

She falls into a deep sleep. She dreams that night, more vividly than ever before. She dreams she is the beautiful woman fighting monsters dressed in indigo, her sword drawn as she fends off the onslaught of fanged beasts. Each one she defeats disappears in a plume of smoke, creating a blanket of it so thick that she can hardly see as she continues to fight. 

She’s defeated them all, and when the smoke clears she’s standing upon a mountain top, higher than any she’s seen before. The sun shines brightly in the sky, warm and radiant on her skin. She reaches up and touches the sun and the flames don’t burn but instead wrap around her fingertips and fill her with warmth. 

She closes her eyes and feels herself float up into the sun, its flames drawing her closer into what can only be described as an embrace until all she feels is its its light, its comfort. Her clothes have burned away from her body, but she doesn’t feel afraid or vulnerable, only happier to take in more of the warmth around her. A peal of laughter tumbles from her lips and she shivers in ecstasy, her delight and love for the sun so powerful she could weep. 

Mikasa wakes with a start, greeted by the dank, cracked ceiling of the bunker and the steady  _ drip, drip, drip  _ of water onto the stone floor.  Her head throbs so painfully she squeezes her eyes shut and pinches her brow.

It’d felt so real, so wonderful and the loss of the dream is so miserable that she has to stop herself from crying.  

She thinks of Levi, his face and voice clear in her mind. 

_ Why am I thinking about him? _

It irritates her that he’s the first thought on her mind because she doesn’t understand it. Why has she come to take such comfort in a man like him, of all people? She pushes the feeling aside, her desire to see him and think of him a useless thing that will only weaken her. 

Mikasa gets out of bed, ignoring the pain that’s still pulsing in her temples and puts on her clothes, a dark green dress with no buttons or details, simply a tie at the waist. 

It’s the book. She needs to see the book, hold it in her hands, feel the paper beneath her fingertips. That has to be it. She slips a knife into her stocking, just in case, and puts her tattered coat on. She doesn’t know what time it is, but it’s been getting cold. 

She locks up the bunker and makes her way across the city quickly. The streets are empty but for a few drifters and druggies, shaking hands and exchanging goods that are quickly stuffed into oversized coats. It must be nighttime. She walks quickly enough that she brushes past any hecklers and ignores the usual harassment hollered at her by men drinking from bottles wrapped in paper.

Mikasa reaches Levi’s house quickly. His neighborhood is dense enough to avoid the extra crime that comes with multiple vacant homes but undeveloped enough that the neighborhood seems relatively quiet. She knocks on his door, using the rhythm he taught her and waits. 

She doesn’t hear anyone stir inside, so she does the knock again, this time louder and harder. Right before she is about to knock for a third time, she hears the locks being unlocked. It takes forever, and Mikasa has to resist the urge to open the door herself after she hears the third one undone. 

The door opens and she sees Levi. An immediate a sense of relief washes over her. It’s been only three days, but it seems as if it’s been longer. He looks tired, the circles beneath his eyes more pronounced than normal, but his usual frown is still there, fixed upon his face. 

“It’s late,” he says as she walks in and takes off her jacket, tossing it over the wobbly wooden chair in the kitchen. 

“I’m sorry, were you asleep?” 

“No.” 

She’s learned that he doesn’t sleep much, and when he does it’s an irregular handful of hours here and there, so this doesn’t surprise her much. He leans up against the table and crosses his arms, his nightshirt pulling taut across his shoulders as he does so. 

“Do you want the book?” he asks gruffly.

She nearly says yes, that the book is all that brought her here. That’s what she told herself she came here for, but the feeling she has while she looks at him is overwhelming, stifling, maddening. She feels like she’s back on the mountain top in her dream, like if she simply reaches out she’ll feel the sun again. 

He flinches when she wraps her arms around him, but when she leans her head on his shoulder she feels him relax.

“Yes,” she says quietly, “but I also…” she inhales deeply, her embarrassment at her emotions warring with her need for honesty, “I also wanted to see you.” 

He says nothing in response. He wraps an arm around her waist, and the other he puts on the back of her head, pressing her close to him with a trembling hand. 

She knows that this is foolish, but whatever it is it can’t be a mistake. She feels that deep inside of herself, the same as she knows how to throw a knife or land a blow, she knows that this is right, that she’s been fighting this feeling of  _ right, right, right  _ since she first laid eyes upon him. 

She looks at him, runs her thumb along his cheekbone, her heart pounding against her chest. He looks at her and for the briefest moment Mikasa thinks he looks afraid. She leans down and presses her lips to his, a gentle, barely there whisper of a kiss that makes her tremble all the same. 

He pulls her closer, threads his hand through her hair and kisses her deeply, his lips moving against hers in a way that makes her feel that she may collapse. They kiss like that, on and off making their way to his bedroom. Instead of going to the bed, he sits on the patchy arm chair in the corner and pulls her into his lap, her legs hanging over the arm of the chair as she kisses him again.

She doesn’t know how long they kiss like this, open mouthed and luxurious, a sweet and slow build of passion between the two of them unlike anything she’s ever felt before. She presses kisses along his cheek, to his ear, down along the side of his neck and he groans, his hips bucking reflexively up against her. He runs his hands along her arms, the rough pads of his fingertips setting fire to her body and filling her with want.

Mikasa has never wanted this, never thought that she would feel desire so keenly, but she needs to see him, to feel his skin against her own in a way that is both foreign to her yet natural. She reaches for the bottom of his shirt and pulls it over his head, revealing his muscled chest. Her stomach turns and she exhales shakily, a strange nervousness blooming in her chest. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice husky with barely contained want. 

She bites her bottom lip and nods before she stands up and pulls off her dress. She watches his throat bob as she bends over to take off her shoes and stockings, the knife she’d holstered there falling carelessly to the ground as she does so.  

She’s thankful she hasn’t worn a corset in months, foregoing the uncomfortable metal boning for simply wrapping cloth around her modest bust. Her hands tremble as she undoes the wrapping. When she lets it fall to the floor she crosses her arms in front of her. 

Despite the fact that countless men before have seen her undressed, this is a first for her. She has never willingly revealed herself like this, never wanted the touch of someone else on her body for the sake of desire and desire alone, and it is nerve wracking. 

He stands up, his eyes alight with the same intensity she remembers from the night they’d first met as he looks at her body. His want for her is a palpable thing that, instead of disgusting her, excites her. He runs his callused hands from her shoulders to her forearms leaving gooseflesh in their wake. He takes her hands into his own, brings her knuckles to his lips and kisses them. 

She wraps her arms around him, pulls him close and enjoys the press of her bare skin against his, the sharp ridges of his abdomen against hers, the thickness of his shoulders as she digs the pads of her fingers into his flushed skin. She kisses him again, this time more want than before, her reservations dismissed by her desire. 

Mikasa unbuttons his pants and pulls them down, leaving him fully unclothed.  She pushes him down onto the bed and kisses him hungrily, equal parts teeth and tongue as she makes her way down his throat, to his pectoral muscle and then above where his heart beats. She can feel it, vital and fast against her lips. He reaches down to her breast and pinches one of her nipples between his thumb and forefinger and she gasps, the sensation pleasurable yet foreign and strange. 

She quickly takes off her panties, leaving her bare against him as she straddles his hips. He sits up beneath her and kisses her breast before taking her nipple in his mouth, his lips parted as he moves his tongue on her. She moans and cards her fingers through his hair as she grinds herself up against his thigh, the pressure between her legs too uncomfortable for her to sit there idly. He does that for a while, and then does the same to the other breast. It works her up to a fevered place where all she can think about is her want for him, how if she doesn’t have him now she’ll die. 

“I want you,” she whispers, her voice shaking at this admission, “I want you now.” 

She reaches down to his cock, gently cradling it in her hand as she feels it twitch at her touch. She gasps as he slips inside of her easily, clenches her hands tightly on his shoulders as she feels every bit of him inside of her before she slowly rocks her hips against his. 

It’s never felt like this before; easy, genuine, pleasurable, but each movement of her body against his pushes her on, that same flow she feels when she fights guiding her forward. She presses her hand against his heart, fans her fingers out on his chest, her rhythm the same as the beat beneath her palm. 

He puts his hands on her waist and flips her onto her back with a quickness that’s shocking even to her. He clasps his hands in hers, clenching the sheets beneath as he thrusts into her harder, but all she wants is more, wants to take every bit of him she can. He squeezes her hands tight, his eyes more black than grey as he finishes with a groan, rolling off of her and panting. 

She looks over at him, chest heaving and skin covered in a thin sheen of sweat and fights the urge to kiss him, but after a moment he surprises her and kisses her again, his hands wandering her body until he reaches down between her legs. 

“What are you doing?” she asks, closing her legs around his hand nervously. 

“I want it to be good for you too,” he says simply.

His touch is tentative at first, reaching down to her wetness and then drawing light circles with his fingertips above until he moves faster. She grabs his shoulders, tastes the skin on his throat, as he draws pleasure from her body. He opens her to him, each pass of his fingers making her vibrate until she’s overwhelmed, her eyes shut tight with stars beneath them as she cries out his name, gasping and panting as he runs a hand through her cropped hair and presses a kiss to her cheek, then again to her mouth.

They spend an uncertain amount of time like that, kissing, touching, learning each part of the other one, the world reduced entirely to feeling, seeing, hearing the other. She loses herself in him, the sound of his voice, the feel of his skin against hers. When they finally tire, she pulls the quilt over the two of them and wraps herself in his arms, her head resting upon his chest, the steady rhythm of his heart lulling her into a dreamless sleep. 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting early because I am going out of town until friday. I'm sorry to the reviewers I haven't replied to yet from last chapter, I promise I'll get back to you all! Thank you for your continued support.

Levi is certain he’s dreaming. No, even that’s absurd. The last twelve hours have been too much, even for his wildest fantasies. 

He’s been with women before, plenty of times, plenty of ways. They were all an easy way to pass the time, with the added benefit of distracting from hunger, if only for a moment or two. But over the years he has developed a distaste for such casual encounters. Once you’ve done it a few times you’ve pretty much done it all, he assumed. 

Levi has heard people speak of love. Isabel had kept a romance novel salvaged from a rubbish heap with half of the pages missing. He’d caught her one night, her face close to the page as she was sounding out the syllables under her breath, eyes alight and cheeks flushed at the thought of it all. Levi has always found such things laughable—silly, imagined luxuries that are perhaps only for above-grounders. 

But he’d been wrong. So laughably, wonderfully, wrong. 

He hadn’t known that a kiss could be fire, that a touch could be flight, that a group of freckles on skin could be as magnificent as the stars in the sky. 

She’s still asleep, though he thinks that she’ll wake up soon, as she’s started to stir. Her eyes are closed, thick, straight lashes resting upon the apples of her cheeks. Her full lips are slightly parted and her expression is serene, giving her an oddly girlish quality. 

Mikasa’s eyes flutter open, groggy and disoriented before she looks at him, a smile on her face and a happy flush on her cheeks. No one has ever looked at him like that, glad to see him for the sake of it. The thought fills him with what he could only describe as elation. 

She says nothing as she leans over to kiss him. Her mouth is the freshest water and he has gone his whole life without a drink. He kisses her back, wraps his arms around her and pulls her against him. Her body is hard with muscle yet soft with curves. He cups her small breast in his hand and she whimpers against his mouth. 

He can feel himself getting hard, just by kissing her, smelling her, feeling her body pressed against his own. He kisses up her jaw and to her ear, taking the lobe of it in his mouth, then kissing down her neck to her breasts. Her small, reddish-brown nipples point outward in the cold of the room. She gasps and says his name under her breath as he takes one into his mouth. The sound of her plea makes his cock twitch with want. He kisses and even bites, the sound of his mouth against her arousing him further. She moans loudly as he grazes his teeth against her nipple.

“Too hard?” he asks, his voice husky and foreign to his ears.

“ _ No,”  _ she moans emphatically. He alternates then between teeth and tongue, the idea that she likes it a bit rougher sending what’s surely all of the blood in his body to his cock. 

He kisses his way down past her breasts and lingers on her stomach, which is striated with muscle in a way he’s never seen on a woman. The raw strength that lurks within her body only arouses him more.

When he makes his way between her legs, she trembles.

“What are you doing?” she asks him, her legs tense and hand clenched in his hair.

“I want to taste you.”

The words fall from his lips without a thought. He hadn’t known he had wanted to do this until he’d said it, but it’s all he wants and may as well be all he’s ever wanted. He presses a kiss to the inside of her thigh, running his tongue up to where her hip and leg meet. He looks up at her. Her expression is a little wary, but she nods at him all the same, curious about his intentions. 

He knows how women get their pleasure. They’re less obvious than men, more secretive and delicate in their nature, but he’s never looked this closely before. Mikasa is soft here, her sex delicately furled like a flower he’d once seen in a book. She quivers at the first pass of his tongue. The taste of her lingers in his mouth and he can’t help but hum slightly. He sucks hot kisses over her sex, lingers on the spots that make her sigh and grip his hair tightly in her fist. She cries out as his nose brushes at the bud above her opening, so he presses his tongue there, repeating the motion until she is crying out, urgent and needy as she bucks up against his mouth. 

He’s not satisfied with that though, so he keeps going, this time tucking his fingers inside of her, the sound of her wetness so enticing that he has to resist the urge to press his hips into the bed for his own relief. His jaw is sore by the time she comes again, her body tense and arching up off the bed as she makes a desperate, reedy, wailing sound. 

He positions himself over her and slips easily inside her, the aftershocks of her pleasure gripping his cock as he thrusts into her warmth. She grabs onto him, her hands bruising as she digs her fingers into his shoulders. He finishes quickly, biting his bottom lip and collapsing onto her as they both catch their breath. 

“I didn’t know men cared to do that,” she says after she’s caught her breath.

He doesn’t say it aloud, but he thinks that there are many things he’d care to do to her.

He gets the impression that sex has never been a pleasurable thing for Mikasa, and the thought makes his stomach turn and jaw clench. He understands that a whore’s work is just that: work. Still, it bothers him that she’d no experience outside of someone having her for a price. 

She pulls him to her and kisses him, passion and pleasure still coursing through the both of them even after they pull apart, their foreheads resting against the other’s, sharing each other’s breath, each other’s hearts, each other’s touch. 

She runs her thumb over his cheek, a simple gesture that makes him so sure that he’s never belonged anywhere until now. 

After a few minutes or so, Mikasa sits up and stretches. He watches as the muscles in her back move, her shoulder blades squeezing together as she laces her fingers over her head and bends back and forth. 

She grabs a sheet off the edge of the bed and wraps it around her, the act of modesty both odd and endearing to him. 

“I’m thirsty, would you like some water, too?” she asks. 

“Sure,” he says lightly. 

She walks out into the other room and he hears her rifling through the cabinet until she finds glasses to pour water into from the jug he keeps on the counter. She comes back and hands him a glass that he gulps down gratefully. 

“So,” she says as she sets down her glass, “believe it or not, I did actually come here to look at the book.” 

“Oh, right.” He’d completely forgotten about the book. He gets up and pulls on a pair of loosely fitting pants, but he doesn’t bother to cover himself further. Despite the chill of the room part of him enjoys how she looks at him. 

He can feel her eyes on him as he bends over and lifts the floorboard where he keeps his few valuable possessions. 

He sets box on the nightstand and unlocks it, then passes the book to Mikasa. Her expression is soft and gentle as she cradles the book in her arms. She lies down, still naked on the bed, and looks at him expectantly, so he lies down next to her and pulls the sheet over them up to their waists.

“What do you think this means?” 

Levi traces his hand over the thick parchment of the book. They lie on their stomachs, propped up on their forearms, the forbidden book laid out between the two of them on the bed. Mikasa rubs her bare foot up against his leg thoughtlessly beneath the twisted bedsheets. 

She scrutinizes the strange symbol on the page, touching it as if the impression of ink could impart some knowledge to her. 

“I don’t know, but doesn’t it seem that these symbols are some kind of letters?” 

“They look complicated.” 

Mikasa nods.

“I don’t know if my mother would have known anything about these. I don’t have any recollection of ever seeing anything like this around our home.” She glances down at the raised mark on her forearm. “This is all I really have connecting me to these people, that and my odd appearance,” she says flatly. 

There’s something very painful about the way she resents her appearance. He can’t blame her. If he’d been sold as a commodity, he thinks he’d also wish he’d looked more common. 

Levi thinks her beautiful, but not because of her unique appearance. Rather, it’s because she is who she is. Her eyes are beautiful because they are hers, her hair is beautiful because it is hers, not because either is strange or foreign to him. He keeps this to himself, though, because he knows that his words would offer her little comfort in the face of a lifetime objectification. 

“What do you think it’s like? Y’know, over there?” Levi asks. “Do you think they really have these huge snake fucks flying around in the sky? What if everyone has to live below ground like we do here? Not because they dare to be poor, disgusting filth like us” — Mikasa chuckles at his sarcasm and rolls her eyes, the smile on her face bringing him euphoria he’d be ashamed to admit to — “but because snakes and birds snap people off the ground?” 

“That’s silly,” she says, amusement evident in her tone. “I think they’re mythical...I remember my mother telling me stories when I was little. She told me that first the sky and heavens were created, and then the earth afterwards,” she trails off, her expression distant, remembering something from a long time ago.

“I’d forgotten these stories until now, I hadn’t realized how important they were, or how forbidden they were. She said the words for these creatures were lost to time, or at least that her mother couldn’t remember far back enough. She never spoke of why we were the only ones like us, and as a child I never wondered. It all makes more sense now,” she says plainly while turning a page to a painting of mountains with foreign symbols all along the side. “Still, I wish that I could read what all of this says,” she continues. 

Levi knows this is almost certainly an impossible wish, but the barely hidden sadness in her voice makes him wish that there were something he could do. 

He looks at her muscled back, her bare body covered only by the threadbare sheet. It’s strange to him, this urge to reach out and touch someone, but he can’t stop himself. He traces a finger along the dip of her spine, down below the sheet to the curve of her hip. They’re already touching but he pulls her closer to him and she sighs. Gently, she closes the book. 

“Thank you for keeping it here,” she says kindly. She sets the book on the nightstand carefully, wary of its fragile binding. Then something catches her eye: “What’s this?” 

The brass ring he keeps in the box sits in the palm of her hand, dull and small. 

“Just something I’ve always had,” he says dismissively. She says nothing in response but still holds it in her hand until she slips it onto her middle finger boredly, then takes it off again. 

“Wouldn’t want to break a finger when you punch. Rings aren’t practical,” she says quietly. 

The ring is somewhat shameful to him, evidence of his sentimental nature that he’s tried to bury for years. 

“I tell myself it was my Mother’s,” he leans back on the headboard and looks away from her, “but it’s probably just something I found when I was a kid.” 

Her face softens as she looks at him, but she doesn’t voice her pity and for that he’s appreciative. 

“You’ve learned a lot about me, about my mother,” she leans back on the bed, the sheet she’d wrapped around her body hanging loose enough that he can imagine it accidentally falling away, a wonderful prospect if he does his thinking with his cock instead of his brain, “but I don’t know really anything about you.” 

He scoffs and looks away.

“There’s not much to know. My mother was a whore, she died of disease when I was young and I don’t remember her well. Nothing special or unusual.” 

She pulls him to her, his head resting upon her breast, and this gesture, of all things, makes him blush. She runs her hand through his hair and rests her chin on his head as she holds him in her arms. 

“You’re definitely unusual,” she says quietly, the rest of her statement unspoken but felt in the touch of her hands.

He doesn’t know what about them is so similar, what exact quality about her that draws him to her short of everything about her, but perhaps it is something special. 

.

.

Mikasa hasn’t had anything to herself in a long time. Over the years, she has learned how to be whatever she needed to be, whatever fantasy anyone else wanted. She’d quickly realized that the only way to belong everywhere, to be everything anyone could dream, was to belong nowhere and be nothing. 

So she had let herself become nothing, a hollow woman who belonged to everyone but herself. Even after killing her kidnappers and doing Kenny’s bidding, she still had been merely an instrument of someone else’s will. It had felt nice to inflict her anger upon others, to feel strong and powerful after years of weakness, but she hadn’t truly belonged.

For the first time in her memory, though, she feels that she belongs. 

Levi has just come back from one of his appointments, this time collecting rent for an above-ground landlord. She can tell he finds the task deplorable, his expression grim and eyes distant as he slings his coat over a chair in an uncharacteristically messy fashion.

Then he sees her, and immediately his expression softens. She doubts others would notice, but she has spent years gauging the reactions of people around her, particularly men, and has grown quite skillful. A slight glimmer in his eye, a small release of tension in his shoulders, a tiny lift to the corner of his mouth that’s not a grin but the makings of a smile — all this tells her he’s glad to be home. 

Levi is strange, unlike any other man she’s known. He is reserved in a way she thinks would be easy to mistake for apathy, but Mikasa knows better than this. This deception is the same as any of her own, a defense to keep others from becoming close, from seeing who they truly are. Mikasa doesn’t think it has ever really worked on her, though. Ever since she’d met him, she feels that she has known everything she truly needs to about him. 

She doesn’t speak, doesn’t voice how glad she is to see him even though it’s been only a few hours since he’d left. That seems too flowery for her to voice. But he knows.

There’s a contentment between the two of them that Mikasa hasn’t felt in forever, and that alone scares her. Part of her wants to pull back, to run away, because holding anything close to her has always doomed them to die, but years of loneliness has left her too weak to let go. Months ago when Kenny Ackerman held a knife to her throat she’d decided to fight, to live by whatever means necessary. 

“What have you been doing while I’ve been gone?” Levi asks her idly as he takes off his coat and hangs it up neatly in on the wobbly coat rack. 

“Nothing much,” she shrugs. “Your house is too tidy for me to clean. Anything I’d do would be redundant,” she teases. 

“I doubt you could tidy to my standards.”

It’s true: His house is impeccable, without even a speck of dust in sight. But she can’t resist the urge to contradict him. 

“I don’t know about that. When I was first brought down here I started out as a cleaning girl. I’m pretty good at it. Not something I’d do for enjoyment, though.” 

“I can already tell you’re messy.”

“Oh really?” she says, feigning offense.

“Mmhm. Let’s start with when you first came over. You got blood  _ everywhere _ .” 

“How rude of me,” she laughs. 

“I had to throw away a quilt, even I couldn’t salvage it. Now you’ve only improved marginally,” he carelessly tosses three knives he’d had hidden on his person onto the table. 

“Well, then, I guess it’s better I leave all the cleaning to you.” 

“Probably.” Levi gets himself a glass of water and gulps down half of it before he sets it down and leans back against the counter. 

“So what  _ did  _ you occupy yourself with?” 

“Just looked at the book more,” she frowns slightly. She looks down at the hem of her sleeves and plays with the frayed edge. 

If she stares too long at the book she is filled with overwhelming sadness and longing, so initially she tried her best to avoid it. She’s failed, of course. She spent the day staring at the pages despite the fact that she’s memorized each one. Each day she finds a new obsession, be it the beautiful and foreign clothing or the strange symbols. Each day she simply wants more. 

Today it was the map. Every detail of the unknown outside that she doesn’t have the language to describe brings with it more questions. What is water so vast it divides land? What kind of people live in the other lands? Do they know about the people here that dwell inside the walls? 

“If it makes you sad, you should look at it less,” he says, his tone slightly reprimanding. “If we think too much things tend to turn to shit.” 

She knows he’s joking, but he’s also right. She’ll go crazy if she spends too much energy on this book about people in far-off lands. It’s nice to feel connected to her mother, but nothing is able to bring her back. 

“I do lots of things I probably shouldn’t do,” she says lowly. She walks over to him and traces a finger along his chest. His face is calm but she watches his throat bob as he swallows. She can tell he’s thinking of her naked and she’s once again surprised by how this amuses her.  

“And yet here I am,” she continues lightly as she pulls away from him, almost girlish in demeanor. She likes how she can tease him and not be concerned about angering him. He rolls his eyes at her and shoves his hands in his pockets. 

“Don’t know why I bother,” he says, but she can see that he is more amused than anything. “Do you have any work coming up?” 

The change of topic makes her stomach turn. Mikasa suspects that no matter how strong she is now that it’s wise and healthy to be apprehensive about Kenny Ackerman. Anything else is arrogance. 

She shakes her head. 

“My injury was a liability. My boss doesn’t want me going to the surface for business any more than necessary.” 

Levi is clearly interested in who she works for and how she came into their line of work, but he’s tactful enough not to ask her directly. She appreciates this, although it also makes her feel slightly guilty. He’s done a lot for her. 

Part of her is also ashamed that she’s traded one master for another. She no longer has her body sold as a commodity by Mr. Bauer, but aside from being far more bearable, how different is killing men for Kenny Ackerman, really? 

_ I’m still not free.  _

She thinks of the book and a world outside walls but quickly admonishes herself for the errant thought. The idea of a life somewhere else is a child’s fantasy, no matter how tantalizing. 

“Well, like I said earlier,” he walks over to her and runs a comforting hand along her shoulder, “it’s a good time to be laying low.” 

She rests her hand on his and squeezes it tightly. He doesn’t ask her for details, he knows that she doesn’t want to discuss it. His respect in this regard is perhaps the greatest thing anyone has ever offered her, a chance at dignity that she’d thought was something she’d had taken years ago. 

“Let’s make dinner, I’m hungry.”

She’s not a good cook but she helps him scrape together a decent soup of root vegetables, which are a luxury for their filling quality alone, not to mention that she enjoys how they taste. They sit down at the wobbly table with mismatched bowls to eat. 

“What were you doing today?” she asks.

He pinches his brow and groans. “Collecting rent for above ground shitlords, same as always.”

She frowns.

“You really hate it, don’t you?”

He shrugs. “It’s a job, same as any. I don’t want to take  _ riskier _ ” — he means assassinations — “employment if I don’t have to.” He takes another gulp of soup. “But it makes me feel like shit.  Even if it’s usually roughing up dumbasses who spent their rent money on blow I know the landlords make a killing off of us down here. None of them needs our money. They just want it to buy fancy shit like fucking flowers and freaky birds and whatever the hell else rich people like.” He rips apart a piece of bread a too aggressively before he shoves it in his mouth. 

Mikasa understands his anger well. She thinks about every wealthy above-grounder who’d used her for their enjoyment.The fancy dresses they’d buy her, the beautiful concerts they’d attend, all of it perfectly curated to craft their perfect lives while down below people starve on the streets. 

“It’s strange how above-grounders seem to think we all chose to live down here, isn’t it?” 

“So I’m not the only who’s noticed that,” his spoon clangs as he tosses it carelessly into his bowl. “It’s a joke. No one would choose to live like this, down in the dark scraping for basic human dignity, and I can barely manage that. I have a house and can eat enough most of the time, but how much dignity do I have when all I’m really doing is helping those above to crush those of us below? I’m as bad as some shit-eating cop. It’s pathetic.” 

“Nothing about you is pathetic,” she says firmly. “You can’t fault yourself for doing what you need to survive. It’s all we can do. We can’t afford to think about everyone else.”

She says “we” before she can think otherwise, but she knows that it’s true. He has become the only important thing in her life. 

“You’re right,” he nods, expression still troubled but less so. “You and I,” he says quietly, a gentleness in his voice that makes her heart skip. 

He’s strong, and she is strong. She wonders if there is really anything they couldn’t accomplish together. The burden of living feels significantly less when she knows that she has him on her side. 

She thinks about the book and the faraway lands. She’s certain that people don’t live underground there and that the air is fresher in a world without walls. 

_ Don’t be silly.  _

She can’t go there, can’t think about such things because even for them it would be impossible. She’s not an idiot and she’s not arrogant, and while her heart longs for so many things she should seek peace where she is.

They do the dishes in comfortable silence, enjoying the other’s company. He washes and she dries. After they finish, Mikasa finds herself looking at Levi. The way he makes her feel is strange. 

She’s heard other whores describe attraction to men and she’d always found it confusing. She’d had a roommate who would sneak away with a man in one of the neighborhood gangs. The girl had said that the sex was better, different than with people who paid for it. Dreamy, flowery descriptions of want and affection that Mikasa had, at the time, dismissed as a young girl’s folly. 

Now Mikasa isn’t so sure. Everything about Levi, the set of his frown, the way his hair falls onto his brow, the way her crosses his arms and his shirt pulls tightly across his shoulders, even the hair on his forearms makes her feel almost delightfully sick, a strange, fevered madness that she can only describe as desire. 

“What are you looking at?” he asks, having caught her staring.

“You.” 

His eyes widen a little, clearly shocked at how forward she is, but Mikasa has pretended to be demure for too long to bother with it now. 

Mikasa pulls him into her arms and kisses him hard on the mouth, her want for him too much for her to keep at bay. She unbuttons his vest and slips it off his shoulders. He chuckles at her eagerness while she drags him into the bedroom, but when she reaches down his pants and grabs his half-hard cock he stops laughing. 

She unbuttons his pants and pushes him roughly onto the bed. Never in her life has she found a cock even remotely attractive. Her circumstances aside, she’d always found them rather silly things: angry-looking, throbbing pieces of flesh that dangle uselessly between legs until provoked. But with Levi it’s different: the sight of him makes her breath quicken and her stomach turn. 

She has never enjoyed sex of any kind, but using her mouth on a man was always one of the things she found most repulsive. It had made her feel used and disgusting, nothing but a warm place for others to exert their control over. But now she almost can’t help herself, can’t resist the urge to map out each part of him with her mouth.

Mikasa sinks to her knees on the edge of the bed and runs her hands over his thighs, making him shiver. She kisses him on his legs, runs her tongue over a ridge in his muscled thigh, the taste and feel of his skin pleasing. She takes her time when she gets to his cock. She touches him, feather-light and barely there and he inhales sharply. She parts her lips around him, the slight bitterness of him doing nothing to deter her as she teases pleasure from him. 

She’s never taken her time like this, preferring to get such things over as quickly as possible, but making Levi tremble and clench his fists on the edge of the bed as he tries and fails to hold back whimpers and groans makes her feel powerful. 

“Fuck, Mikasa—” she smooths her lips further down him than she had before and he moans, “stop, I want—” he sighs again, unable to finish his thought completely but she understands what he wants.

She stands up and looks at him. The sight of his flushed skin and sweat beading on his brow makes her body throb. Seeing him so thoroughly wanting for her making the wetness between her legs so much that it coats the inside of her thighs.

Mikasa doesn’t break eye contact with him the entire time she undresses herself. She moves slowly, taking her time with each button and fastener, enjoying the feel of Levi’s eyes on her, the weight of his gaze on her body a comfortable, heady thing that makes her heart thrum against her ribcage. 

Her clothes lie discarded on the floor in a messy heap that she kicks aside with her foot before she straddles Levi and pins him down onto the bed. She fists her hand in his hair and kisses him, biting his bottom lip as she reaches down with her other hand to guide him inside her. She rocks her hips against him slower than he would like, his impatience for her showing in the grip of his hands on her hips. 

He reaches something of a breaking point, her slow, almost teasing pace not enough for him. She’s not quite sure how he manages it because she goes from straddling him, most of her weight pinning him down to on her hands and knees with him behind her, his body hard and warm against her back as he pushes into her. She moans, the feeling of him from this angle and position so much tighter and deeper than she’s accustomed to. 

He holds her in place with one arm and reaches around in front and moves his hand as hard and fast as his hips against her. All she can think is just how  _ good  _ it is: the roughness of his movements, the way she pushes back against him, the act more of a conflict than an act of submission for either of them. She wants it this way, wants everything he can offer her because she knows she can take it.

“Harder,” she demands, her voice low and throaty as the headboard rocks noisily against the wall with his thrusts. 

She’s close, but when he reaches around and touches her it’s enough to undo her completely, she cries out and grips the sheets in her hands, the world sizzling white for a split second as she comes. He kisses her where her neck slopes into her shoulder as his rhythm gets sloppy and uneven before he finishes.

He rolls off of her and sighs, running a hand over his face as he does so. Her body hums with the sweetness of exertion, her limbs heavy and her skin sensitive in the aftermath. 

Mikasa pulls the sheets over them and turns onto her side so she can better look at him. He doesn’t smile but grabs her hand and looks at her, his expression unreadable but his feelings apparent all the same.  

“I saw you years ago. Sitting up in that window,” he says quietly. “You were sad...and I was bothered that it bothered me, so I stopped walking that way,” he sighs and presses a kiss to her wrist. “Now I know it bothered me because I felt the same sadness you felt, and seeing you reminded me of too many things I’ve always ignored.” 

It’s still hard to believe that this is happening, that loneliness isn’t her sole companion anymore, that her existence isn’t a burden she needs to bear alone. She feels childish and needy, but she supposes she can’t fault herself this as it’s been so long since she’s had anything besides memories that haunt her.  

“Wherever you go I’ll go,” he runs his hand over her mouth, up her cheek and into her hair. He presses his forehead to hers, their faces so close that when he speaks his lips brush against hers, “I swear that.” 

“I’ll do the same for you, just like you said, you and I,” she whispers back, a vow that comes from her before she can even think twice about it. It’s more than words, more than anything she has felt before. 

She feels an odd strength at her words, a raw, torrential power that has no beginning or end, an infinity inside of her that pulls her to him, between them and compels her to speak words she’d wanted to say earlier.

“Let’s run away,” she whispers to the darkness, a desire, a wish, a dream that she only dares voice in the quiet of the night. “Let’s leave and never come back,” she runs her fingers along his arms and pulls him close to her, his body warm and soothing against hers. 

“To where?” he asks lightly. “Take our chances in the exterior, live near the mountains and hide from everyone?”

“No,” she laces her fingers with his, “let’s leave this place entirely. We’ll take a boat and ride the river past the walls and to the big water, then to Asia, we’ll find our way there together. We don’t need anyone else.” 

Mikasa knows that these words are foolish, that if anyone else said them they’d sound ma. Perhaps she is mad—mad with power, mad with dreams, mad from the touch of a man. But if it is madness to want something more she embraces it, lets it flow through her until she’s nothing  _ but  _ mad, mad for whatever dream she’s living in. 

Rational thought wars with want in Levi’s eyes. She looks at him and suddenly his uncertainty seems to disappear, replaced only with her same resolve. Whatever madness has consumed her fills him the same. He rolls on top of her and kisses her. 

“Yes,” he says between kisses, “let’s leave.” 

They love each other with a desperation like never before, each touch a promise, each kiss a dream, every breath and whimper a prayer uttered with the sincerest devotion. Her devotion fills her with strength, every part of her cries out for closeness to him in a way that makes her feel frantic. 

She digs her fingernails into his shoulder blades, her back arching off the bed as she comes faster and harder than she has before, the immensity of whatever it is between them, whatever she feels inside too much for her to bear.

He stays on top of her, their bodies pressed together as they kiss each other. She’s shaking and feels tears roll down her cheeks, the energy inside of her far too immense and volatile to contain inside of her body.

Part of her, a small, dark voice inside reminds her that she deserves nothing, that this is a hope and hope is for fools. But it doesn’t matter. 

Nothing matters besides him, what she feels for him and what he feels for her. 

They fall asleep in each other’s arms. Mikasa dreams of rivers turned purple in the sunset, of water stretching as far as her eyes can see until it meets the sky. Levi is with her, and they grab onto the tail of a rainbow-colored bird. Its feathers ignite, consumed by flames that don’t burn either of them as they fly up into the heavens. The great bird burns until it’s consumed, its body fracturing into stars that shoot across the night sky. They stay there, hands intertwined and smiling in the light of the moon, where they remain among the stars.  

They never make it to where they were going. 


	12. Chapter 12

When Mikasa was a child, she would pick flowers in the springtime. The memory has started to fade; the song of the birds isn’t clear anymore and the grass beneath her bare feet is all but forgotten. Until she read this book, she’d forgotten something else.

Her mother taught her how to tie her dress up around her legs and dig in the riverbed. 

_ Omodaka  _ is what mother had called them. Mother occasionally had strange words for things, words that didn’t quite fit and felt strange on her tongue, so she often remembers these words...even if she doesn’t remember what they mean, she remembers how they’d sounded.

Mikasa remembers how the mud would squish between her toes on cool spring days as mother gave her instructions. 

“You need only to disturb the riverbed, then the  _ Omodaka  _ float to the surface. You just need to be patient and...right there!” And mother would scoop up the small, white tubers into her apron. 

After they’d collected enough to boil a full pot, they’d sit on the riverbed together, plucking flowers off the root and tossing them into the river.

She’d watched them float away, taken by the current to the riverbend and then away. 

“Where do they go?” 

“What do you mean, Mikasa?” 

“The flowers...the water even, where does it go?”

Mother had leaned back on her forearms and looked up at the sky, the brim of her straw hat flopping back a little in the gentle breeze of spring. 

“Rivers find their way back to where they belong. They begin but they never truly end, simply continue on to become something else.”

“What  _ else _ do you mean?” 

Mother had shrugged. “I’m not sure, maybe a long time ago someone knew such things, I only remember stories that my mother had told me...but I think they lead somewhere new.” 

Mikasa runs her fingers over the map, lines that spread out from inside the walls and end at the big blue space between land. 

Last night something changed. She doesn’t know what happened or how, but she feels as if she’s a new person. The world has been made anew and it’s now her’s for the taking, anything is possible, at least, if it’s for Levi. 

It’s not unlike the feeling she’d had when Kenny had attacked her, when she’d chosen to survive. Perhaps it’s similar to that except now instead of simple survival she has chosen life. 

“I think if we take a boat down the river, we can find our way to more water, and then to Asia,” Mikasa says confidently. 

Levi leans over the table and scrutinizes the map, his frown making the lines on his face more pronounced. 

“Let’s say we manage to make it out of the walls without being killed by soldiers, just for the sake of this insane hypothetical scenario. Even if we manage to hoard enough food and supplies for what is inevitably a months long journey, there are titans outside the walls.”

They’ve been bickering all morning about this and it frustrates her. Every detail she proposes he pulls apart until it seems pointless. She understands that a fair amount of this is going to rely on chance. She’s not naive enough to think everything will go as planned, even if Levi seems to think she is. 

“You know how to use that stuff,” she points at the leather straps and canisters that hang neatly in the corner of the bedroom, “and that’s what the soldiers use to kill titans, and they go looking for them practically...we can fight them off,” pride swells in her chest at the thought, “killing is killing, no matter what it is, and we’re good at that, better than practically anyone.” 

She playfully runs her finger along his chest, intentionally lowering her eyes in a mockery of coyness that many men consider seductive. 

“Are you afraid? Certainly a strong man like you isn’t scared.” 

“Don’t talk bullshit like that to me, I’m serious,” he swats away her hand and glares at her, “what we’re talking about is something no one has ever done before. At least not that we know of. Outside of the walls is the very least of our worries. There are countless things that can and probably will go wrong even in here. We need to have a plan, and it needs to be a really good one.” 

She rolls her eyes but fights a smile, something she finds herself doing far more often than before, but he still looks troubled.

“I know there are details we need to iron out, and we will do that,” she says seriously, “but don’t forget, it’s you and me. We can do it...we can run away,” she takes his hand and places it over her heart, “believe in me, believe in yourself, because it’s the only thing in the world that we can trust in.”

That same madness she’d felt last night is there again, a heady combination of both her strength and her devotion makes her feel invincible. 

“Don’t you feel that?” she presses his hand firmly into her chest where her heart beats, “I do. And I know you feel it too. What’s in you is like what’s in me. Together we can do anything.” Her words make her feel feverish and overwhelmed with want for him, every bit of him until it almost feels painful. 

He looks at her, expression drawn and stern and she doubts herself for a moment, until he nods shortly. He has to feel it too....the same wild, free feeling she has inside.

“You’re right,” he pulls her to him and she gasps a little at the suddenness of the gesture, “I can’t go back to how it was before anyways,” he runs his hand through her hair and she leans down, her forehead resting on his, noses touching. She feels simultaneously weak and energized, his touch alone making her feel as if her body is aflame, the same as it so often is in her dreams. 

“So even if we die trying to leave it doesn’t matter.” 

.

.

Levi prefers action to words. With Mikasa it’s easy for him to understand what she wants, what she needs even without a word...but right now, his hands on her body, her mouth on his he can’t help but feel that maybe this is a time they should be speaking instead...but he can’t resist this, this sweet, frantic attraction he feels to her.

He pushes her down on the bed and pulls up her skirt, his body moving almost mindlessly, as if he were merely a passenger, swept up in the flow of his need for her. He pulls her panties aside and puts two fingers inside of her, finding her already wet with desire as she presses her hips up against his hand and sighs, lips parted and cheeks flushed. 

He doesn’t even bother to undress her while he has her, she’s wound up enough that he knows it’s still good for her and that immediacy is what they both need. He lets himself lose himself in her, the pressure of her fingers on his forearms, the way she moves against him, the sound of her breath, the smell of her hair, until he doesn’t have the ability or desire to see reason. He says her name quietly, his lips brushing against the hollow of her throat as he says the closest thing he’s ever uttered to a prayer, over and over again.

They lie on the bed afterwards. Her clothes are rumpled and her hair is tousled as she catches her breath. 

He can’t look away from her, can’t stop wanting her, wanting the dream that she represents to him...a world somewhere new, somewhere different from the pit he’s known his whole life...a life where he isn’t alone, an existence with dignity. 

Her idea is crazy...mad, even...but he feels it inside of him too, that if they just go together that it’ll be fine...that he can trust not only his own strength but hers as well. 

He has to play it cool for the both of them. Every detail, every element of this plan needs to be perfect. The plan needs back up plans, the back up plans need back up plans. 

Levi traces the apple of her cheek with his finger and she smiles gently. He wants to see that smile above the surface, outside of the walls where people sold her for what she looked like. He wants to see her laugh. A real laugh. A deep belly laugh that’s graceless and ridiculous. 

Later. All of that can come later. He has to keep this grounded. She can dream enough for the both of them. Still, he can’t help but gain strength from what has quickly become their dream. 

The words between them in the darkness of the room last night weigh down on his heart...no matter how ridiculous this is, he knows that he can’t go back to how it was before. Even if she is the one dreaming, now that he knows that something else is outside he has to chase it, and perhaps with her,  _ for  _ her, he can succeed.

There’s still that deep sense of foreboding that he feels...he’s felt it since that night they’d met...that the world is on the cusp of something new. 

_ As if the world were holding its breath.  _

If he thinks upon it, he’s had this same feeling one other time in the past, when he was a younger man. He’d ignored it, likely chased away the feeling with more practical concerns like hunger and a need for shelter, then it’d passed. 

It’s stronger now than it was then though. 

But he ignores it. 

He’s never had anything like this, never felt that someone understood or cared the way she does.

Someone who chases the loneliness he feels away. And it doesn’t just leave for a moment...it’s as if she’s found her way into him, connected them on a level he doesn’t fully understand so that he’ll never feel lonely again. It’s too sweet, too good for him to reject, so he accepts it greedily and without regret. 

When Levi sees something nice, he’s not going to sit and stare at it. He’ll take it. 

.

.

“We can go up to the surface today,” Mikasa says sternly. She clearly listened when he’d said they need to make concrete plans to accompany the dream. 

Mikasa has fixated upon finding a mode of transportation with a fervor he would find unsettling were he not familiar with it. He’s at the very 

“I have a past... _ client, _ ” she says the word like a curse, the notion of calling it such a thing vile on her tongue, “who was an inventor and merchant, made his living on innovation and steam-powered engines. He’ll have something perfect to suit our purposes,” she hides a switchblade in her stocking and adjusts her skirt. She looks at him expectantly. 

“Right now?” 

“ _ Yes  _ right now!” she says exasperatedly, “you were the one telling me that we need more concrete plans,” she frowns, “besides, I want to get this part over with,” she adds darkly. 

Levi frowns. Whores aren’t always trapped and angered by their circumstances. Most of them eat better than the average individual, have roofs over their heads. High-end ones even have access to modest medical care and take frequent trips to the surface. 

Even if Mikasa had been one such woman, Levi can see the way that time haunts her, the loathing and sadness that she feels when she thinks on it. It angers him, not because he feels jealous that other men have had her as that’s a ridiculous notion, but rather so many had had her against her will. 

“We can gather information too,” he says calmly, a facade he puts up for her sake. 

He sets aside his anger the way he’s done repeatedly for as long as he can remember as they make their way out of the Underground. The streets are oddly quiet, they don’t see a single police patrol on the winding path to the surface. 

It’s late afternoon above ground and the sun stings his eyes. He blinks a few times to adjust to the light, then takes a deep breath, the fresh air a soothing, bittersweet feeling. And yet, it’s different now than it had been in the past. He can’t shake the feeling that even here, above ground with the sunlight on his skin, they’re just as trapped as below, no better than birds in cages. 

_ Some simply have a prettier cage. _

Mikasa’s expression is solemn, her beautiful face blank and cool with what he thinks can only be bitterness. 

The street is alive and bustling with life, a celebratory feel in the air. Levi loses track of celebrations above ground, sometimes he thinks that they’ll celebrate a good shit for a week if given the chance. It’s the way of things up here, to luxuriate in decadence while those below starve. 

“What have you got on this guy?” 

“The usual. He’s a family man, and a meek one at that...our meetings were always discreet, so I imagine he would dislike for them to be disclosed to others...besides,” her expression darkens slightly, a glimmer of excitement in her eye, “I wouldn’t mind acting upon some threats.”

Mikasa enjoys violence in a way that he doesn’t. It’s not something he is greatly bothered by, but rather something he does out of necessity. But for Mikasa he can tell it’s different.

He’s not sure he can blame her. After years of being powerless, she’s somehow come into strength for the first time. 

His mind wanders slightly, curious about this piece of her past that he doesn’t know, but he pushes it aside. No matter what they are to each other, her past is not his own, her secrets are not his and neither are her demons. If she hasn’t disclosed it to him, it’s not needed.

Still, she is so similar to him the idea pulls at him. Had she once felt her body fill with power? Did the world come alive for her in an instant, the same way it had for him?  

“After this we should stake out the entrances to the district. Observe some boats passing through the canals, that way we can determine how best to go unnoticed.” 

“Agreed,” she says firmly, though Levi thinks that her mind is distant, all of her focus on whatever violent fantasy she’s had stored away in her mind. 

They arrive at their charge’s place of work: a fancy looking storefront with a heavy wooden door and stained glass windows. The sign reads “Dietrick Hildebrand: Inventor and Engineer.”

Mikasa looks up to the second floor and clenches her jaw. Sitting at a desk near the window is clearly their charge, pouring over some after hours work. 

Mikasa pulls the door, but it doesn’t budge. She pulls again angrily, then again with a grunt until he stops her.

“Hold on, it’s no good to rip the door out and make a scene.” 

Mikasa looks away, embarrassed at her anger and crosses her arms.

“Right.”

Levi would like to say something comforting but he lacks the words for such things. Either way, he knows that she understands his sentiment when her expression softens ever so slightly. 

He fishes inside his coat pocket and finds the wire he always keeps on hand. Above ground locks are pretty weak, all things considered. They trust too much in the system, in their police and in their neighbors, so it takes less than a minute for him to knock the tumblers into place and open the door. 

There’s no one around, any underlings seemingly gone home to their families for whatever celebration is occurring. The office is nice, sturdy wooden beams and elegant stained glass windows that color the room with afternoon sunlight in all shades. 

He recognizes the look in Mikasa’s eyes. She is a predator stalking her prey as she walks of the stairs, her body both filled with tension yet calm and fluid, assured in each step she takes forward to the office. He follows her and merely watches as she opens the door. 

“Gertrude, I told you not to visit me in the office, I’m very busy–”

His words die in his throat at the flip of Mikasa’s knife on his throat. 

“I’m not Gertrude,” she says, her voice low and sinister. 

Hildebrand squeaks, his eyes wide as he takes in Mikasa’s face.

“Jade?!” he asks, his voice shrill and high like a teenager’s, “I–”

“I’m not Jade, not anymore,” Mikasa hisses through her teeth and pressing the edge of the blade to the white of his throat, “but here’s what you’re going to do,” Levi watches her lean in towards Hildebrand, grey eyes flashing dangerously, “remember those boats you used to spend so much time talking about? The ones you use to bring things in from the exterior...you’re going to write down where it is and give it to me, deed and all. It’s a present for all the times I had to roll over and have you pressed up against me, every time you used me–”

“Now listen here! I paid good money for each time!” Hildebrand struggles for a moment but Mikasa knees him swiftly in the groin. Hildebrand jerks forward in pain but Mikasa slams him back into his chair.

She grabs him by the chin, his full face squished between her thumb and index finger as she takes her knife and drags the sharp edge across the hollow of his throat. It’s light, barely breaking the skin but it’s enough to make Hildebrand yip like a dog and burst into tears. 

“You paid the man who  _ owned  _ me, not me.”

Mikasa’s lost in the flow of the task at hand, so much so that Levi isn’t sure she even really sees him in the room. He’s seen this side of her before, this brutality, and was drawn to it. But here she is also vengeful, an emotion that Levi has little experience with. It’s an odd sight to behold, but he watches all the same as Mikasa wipes Hildebrand’s tears and laughs lightly at the sight of them on her fingertips. 

“I’ll stop cutting and I won’t tell your wife, Gertrude I presume? About your dalliances. If you don’t feel like cooperating...well, I’ve become quite proficient at slicing things, and if you’re curious I can show you more...you always liked that, being shown things,” she leers at him, a mockery of a whore’s flirtatious glance that makes Levi shiver, “so maybe it’d be fun.”

“Okay, okay,” Hildebrand hiccups, his eyes bulging and hands clenched on the arms of the chair, “I’ll, I’ll, I’ll–” Mikasa slaps him hard across the face with an open palm, her disgust evident in the pull of her mouth. Hildebrand shakes his head and forgoes words for action. He reaches inside the drawer in his desk and pulls out a thick, official looking sheet of parchment. 

“Just sign it,” Mikasa says when he tries to fill in the details. Hildebrand messily scrawls an illegible excuse for a signature on the bottom of the page and hands it to Mikasa. She hands the paper to him, acknowledging his presence in the room for the first time. He folds the paper once and slips it into his breast pocket. 

Mikasa lets go of Hildebrand roughly and puts her knife back in her stocking with a flourish that Levi thinks, while showy, has the desired effect of terrifying Hildebrand even more. 

“If you go to the police I’ll know, and I’ll kill you,” Mikasa says sternly. Levi isn’t sure if she’s bluffing, but Hildebrand looks scared enough that Levi thinks that it doesn’t matter either way. 

Mikasa walks out of the room, footsteps firm and steady. Before Levi follows he can’t help but take a good look at one of many men who’ve caused Mikasa pain. He clenches his fist, wishing desperately that he could beat on the pathetic oaf until his face was more mess than structure, but such vengeance is far too conspicuous and messy. 

So instead Levi reaches for the wallet on the desk, opens it and takes out the wad of cash inside, all crisp, nice bills that clearly haven’t been in circulation. Fresh from the bank. 

“I’m taking this because I can’t kill you,” Levi says dully as he puts the bills in his breast pocket along with the deed, “count your blessings,” he glares at him and Hildebrand whimpers, a sad, pathetic sound before he wets himself. 

Levi frowns before he leaves. 

Mikasa all but runs out of the building. When he catches up with her she’s turned into an alleyway. She punches the brick wall, four times until her knuckles are cracked and bloody as she dissolves into tears.

He says nothing as he watches her cry messy, hiccuping sobs into the brick wall. After a minute she stands up straight, her eyes red and puffy and lip trembling. 

“I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him so badly,” she whispers shaking her head. He pulls her to him and she buries her head in the crook of his neck, breathing heavy and still a bit shaky as she tries to calm down.

“We could always go back, I’m sure he’s still sitting there pissing himself,” he says lightly as he holds her to him. She laughs a little and pulls away from him, rubbing her eyes despite the fact that she’s still crying and shakes her head. 

“It’s not worth ruining our plan over, and I don’t want to draw attention to his assets, the police will take everything for themselves in the name of an investigation and then it’d be much harder to take a boat from someone we don’t know,” she says, wrapping an arm around him and leaning her head on his shoulder. “Still, I just...I want to kill every last one of them.”

Her voice is dark and dangerous; a woman convicted and capable of exacting the type of vengeance she envisions if she willed it. Were it not for the pain she’s experiencing he’d find this quality attractive, the danger of it all seductive and exciting. 

“I’d say the same, but I know you wouldn’t need me to.” She scoffs at this. 

“What a romantic concept, your faith in my ability to commit murder.” 

“It’s how we met,” he deadpans, “what, not a normal way for people to get together?” 

She snorts. It’s an ungraceful, silly sound that he can’t help but find more than a little endearing from a woman who was making death threats moments ago. 

“Here,” he pulls out the wad of cash he’d stolen off Hildebrand and Mikasa’s eyes widen, “let’s blow all of this tonight, no regrets. It’s no vengeful killing spree, but it’s at least a little satisfying to blow that fucker’s cash on a good time, hmm?”

The idea is foreign to both of them, spending time above ground is strange enough. Aside from the usual limitations, there’s just an unspoken sense of  _ you don’t belong _ that he normally feels here.

But he doesn’t feel that right now. Perhaps it’s because he now belongs wherever Mikasa is, that it’s impossible for him to feel out of place if she’s near. 

“What about gathering information?” she asks, her voice still a little thick with her sadness. 

“No reason we can’t do that and have a good time. It’s actually better, less suspicious than two out of place people conducting surveillance.”

She looks at the bills one more time then kisses him on the cheek, her lips lingering long enough to make him feel flustered. 

“That sounds like a good idea,” she says quietly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back. I really needed a break from fandom and fanfic to get a bit of time to myself. Family is busy, the fandom is on fire and I just needed to refocus a bit. Hopefully we are back to weekly updates. I'd love to hear all your thoughts, thank you all so much for reading.


	13. Chapter 13

Mikasa is surprised how well she remembers this part of the city. It’s not so far into the interior that it’s pure decadence and nobility, but Mikasa knows for a fact that everyone who lives here goes to bed at night with a full belly. She’s never allowed herself to enjoy being above ground before, the feeling of being carted around like some sort of exotic pet outweighing the fresh air and decadent foods. 

Mikasa stops to look at a dress in a window. It’s unlike anything else she’s seen before. It’s red with buttons and rouching on the hip. The bodice is fitted and the collar is a different color, a purple tinged with grey. 

“Let’s go in,” Levi says.

“What—”

“Come on,” he says opening the door and going inside. 

She reluctantly follows him inside. 

“Oh, sorry I was just closing up,” a woman with thick glasses and messy brown hair looks up from her desk.

“Can she try on the dress in the window?”

“Oh, right off the mannequin? I mean, she  _ could, _ ” the woman gets up from her desk, a spring in her step at the prospect of business.

“Levi—”

“You like it, right?” 

Mikasa looks over as the seamstress unbuttons the dress and pulls it off the dressform. It’s truly beautiful and unlike anything she’s ever seen before. 

“Yes, but–”

“Then try it on,” he insists. 

She feels flushed at his insistence but steps behind a curtain and undresses. The seamstress helps her into the dress, tying and buttoning the dress. 

“Step up here,” the seamstress says, gesturing at a platform. 

Mikasa nervously smooths her hands over the skirt. The material is light and oddly practical for such an ornate dress. 

She looks at herself in the full length mirror in front of her and feels her chest tighten at her reflection. Her hair is cropped short and falling into her eyes, her face is free of rogue or lash oil. In the past when she has worn beautiful clothes, they felt like a prison. Something for another to own her with, another way for her to please someone else. 

This is nothing like that. It’s not bondage or ornamentation but beautiful for the sake of it. Beautiful because she thinks it so. 

“I just made this one for fun, it’s not really the current style,” the seamstress says as she fusses with the hem, “Your shoulders are a bit broad, I’d have to let it out a bit…”

She catches Levi’s gaze in the mirror and sees him looking at her. He’s calm, but there’s a rare glimmer of something she can’t quite place in his eye. Delight?  

“Can you do it now?” 

“Oh thats…I have family to meet with.”

Levi pulls out some bills, doesn’t even bother counting them before he slides them across the desk. The seamstress’s eyes widen. 

“Can you do it now?” he repeats calmly. 

“Yes sir!” she says happily. 

The seamstress talks quickly as she makes minor adjustments on the dress as Mikasa wears it. A stitch here, a tug there and she’s done. 

“Thank you for your business. Are you two off to the festival?” 

“Yes,” Mikasa says confidently even if she still has no idea what is being celebrated. 

She glances at herself in the mirror again. For the first time in memory she feels pretty. Not an ornament or a thing, but simply a woman dressed well for an evening.

“Let’s go, we don’t want to be late,” Levi says linking his arm with hers. This, of all things, makes her cheeks feel warm with embarrassment at the familiarity. She’s still not used to the casual intimacy that has grown between the two of them. She’s certain he isn’t either.

It seems that tonight is going to be an evening of firsts for the both of them. 

The sun is almost completely set now, the sky a deep blue that’s almost black and a full harvest moon hangs low and big above. Levi keeps looking up at the sky, almost nervously.  

“Are you okay?” she asks him. 

“Yeah, why?”

“You just keep looking up like that, it makes you seem on edge.”

He looks down and scoffs as he kicks a rock. He shakes his head.

“Nah, I’m just not used to being up above like this, haven’t looked at the sky very much,” he says flippantly. 

The thought had never occurred to her, that he’s spent so little time above the surface that something as simple as the night sky would be such a wonder to behold for him. 

_ He was born down below. He’s always been there.  _

The thought pains her. Her life has not been an easy one, but at the very least she’d known the love of her mother and father, enjoyed a life of relative ease in the woods with them for her first nine years. 

Levi had had no such thing. 

Down the street there’s a row of stalls farther than she can see. Children run around gleefully. Couples walk together arm in arm. The banner above says Harvest Festival. 

“They’re all celebrating food that they brought in from the exterior,” Levi says dryly. “Why doesn’t this surprise me?” 

“Because it’s ridiculous, and that’s all we can expect from people up here,” she laughs. Normally this observation would leave her feeling bitter and angry, but she’s too tired of that right now. She wants to forget, just for an evening, if she can.

“You, miss! In the red dress! Wouldn’t you like a prize?” 

She turns and sees a portly man dressed in a red-striped suit gesturing to them. 

“Sure,” she says. 

Mikasa hands the man a coin and examines the booth. There is a target, each ring labeled with points. 

“Three tries, and if you get enough points you can pick out a prize!” the man sets down three knives. Mikasa picks them up and examines them. They’re dull and she’s certain that it would take a more than average throw to get them to stick, in addition to being weighted poorly for throwing. 

She picks up all three knives and places one between three fingers.

“Oh,  _ you’re  _ going to throw?”

She glares at the man and Levi chuckles. She glances at the target, bends her arm and throws, flicking her wrist just so as she releases all three knives. Each one lands in the center circle with a satisfying thump.

The man’s jaw drops as he looks at the knives.

“How did you...I’ve never seen anyone do that,” he sweats a little, clearly not happy to part with a decent prize, “well, fair is fair I guess, nine points total up for the top shelf,” he says, though his tone is bitter and not at all amused. 

She points to a stuffed bear on the top shelf. 

“I’ll take that one.” She points. 

The game attendant grumbles as he hands her the bear. Mikasa is surprised to feel that it seems to be made of real fur. It’s softer than anything she’s touched and the fur is dyed a dark brown, with pretty glass eyes sewn onto the top. 

She smiles and hands the bear to Levi.

“I’m very proud to win such a fine trophy for my beau.” Mikasa laughs when he flushes and grumbles embarassedly. Still, he accepts the bear all the same. 

They leave the irritated gamekeeper and walk down the busy street.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Levi says as he examines the toy. 

“What, you don’t want to keep it as a token of my affections?” Mikasa asks dryly. He rolls his eyes but she can tell he’s amused. 

“Probably should give it to some kid. Ari might be too old but I think he has a little sister or cousin, I forget which,” he trails off.

“Who’s Ari?” 

“Just a kid I pay to do odd jobs for me. Gathers intel, plays go-between for me and clients. He helps hide visible connections between me and rich people who want to pay to snuff someone out.” 

Mikasa frowns. 

“That sounds like a pretty significant loose end.”

“Don’t speak in riddles,” Levi says shortly. “Even if I understand your implication, I don’t like it.” 

They stop by a group of street performers. A woman rides a unicycle and spins plates on a thin wooden pole. 

This Ari boy worries her. The fact that Levi even mentions him illustrates that he’s somewhat attached. 

The game they’re playing is too dangerous, the plans they’re making can’t afford any loose ends. It needs to be perfect. 

Still, she shouldn’t speak in the half truths she’d learned so well. Not with Levi.

“I’m sorry,” she grabs his hand gently and laces her fingers with his. “We can discuss it later.”

The street performer drops a dish and the crowd laughs. 

“It’s okay,” he says evenly. “Let’s go get something to eat.” 

They leave the street performers behind and go to a tavern. It’s clean and not as busy as other taverns. Mikasa appreciates the lack of rowdy patrons.

They order sandwiches and steins of ale before they sit at a small table in the corner of the room.

Levi looks around the room, surveying each individual with feigned indifference. She’s sure he’s looking for any suspicious characters or threats, that this is something he does without even thinking about it. 

She likes to watch him. Something about it is reassuring. They have a similar way of perceiving the world and that is a comfort.

Their sandwiches arrive, warm and toasted with melting cheese. The smell of it makes her salivate. She bites into the crusty bread and has to hold back a groan at how delicious it is. Levi doesn’t bother, his expression elated as he bites into the food. 

The bread is fresher than anything Mikasa has eaten in recent memory and the mustard is so bold that she has to eat slowly. Levi devours his food quickly then flags over the tavern maid. 

“Can I get a loaf of this bread?”

“Just the bread?”

“Yeah, with butter and that sticky stuff if you have any more of it.”

The tavern maid raises an eyebrow and looks at them both as if they’re more than a little strange, but when Levi hands her a crisp bill she shrugs, puts it down the front of her shirt and goes off to get it for them. 

The ale is tart and strong. 

She’s never drank alcohol for leisure. In the past, she’d been nervous for an appointment with a client and drank far too much. The punishment she’d received for that transgression was enough to make her swear off of the stuff, no matter how welcome the numbness had been. 

But ale tastes sweeter, better, lighter when bought with stolen money and in the company of the one she trusts. She feels her cheeks warm. 

“Any idea what’s being celebrated up here?” Levi asks her as he finishes his stein and gestures to the tavern maid, who has just returned with a loaf of bread and a dish of butter, for a refill. 

Mikasa shakes her head. “No, but I’ve learned that people up here don’t need much of a reason to celebrate anything.”

“Sure can eat a lot,” the maid murmurs almost amusedly as she refills both of their steins. “Anything else I can get the two of you?”

Levi is already busy sawing into the bread roughly and slathering it with butter and honey.

“No, thank you,” he says a little gruffly. 

“Well, let me know if you change your mind.” She turns on her heel and leaves to go serve the rest of the room.

They drink and eat their fill, making quiet conversation and even laughing the evening away. 

It’s easy to pretend that everything is okay up here. Easy to pretend that they didn’t rob a man hours earlier, that for the last month the world hasn’t felt like it’s about to collapse around them at any moment.

Instead she notices things that make her happy; the way Levi boredly rests his chin upon his fist, how his shirt pulls delightfully across his broad shoulders, the way his hair falls over his brow, the way he listens attentively to what she says. 

A small band starts to play, it’s just drums and an odd piping instrument that’s small but so loud it makes her have to shout to be heard.  People get up to dance and in a few minutes the floorboards start to shake as everyone dances. Mikasa isn’t familiar with this kind of music at all. Every time she’d been to any occasion requiring dancing it had been stuffy slow tunes meant more to display women as finery to others.  But this music is invigorating, it makes her heart race and body want to move. She claps along with the rhythm and smiles.

Maybe she’s a little emboldened by the ale she’s drank or maybe she’s looking to keep dreaming, keep forgetting, keep moving, but it’s easy for her to stand up and grab Levi by the hand. 

“What are you—”

“Come on, let’s try!” she says.

“I don’t know how to dance,” he half shouts over the thunderous music.

“I don’t know this one either, but I can lead, I’m taller anyway,” she laughs a little as his cheeks flush. She grabs him close by the waist, the way a man would a woman and she laughs at his indignant expression. 

“Are you uncomfortable?” she teases.

“No,” he huffs, “don’t need to lead a dance to feel good about myself.” 

They dance together, loud, stomping steps along with the crowd that seems to make the whole tavern shake. They spin and twirl and Mikasa throws her head back in laughter at the glee of it all. It’s almost too much. It’s too simple, too good for it to be something that’s actually happening to her. 

She doesn’t know how long they dance. Long enough for her to sweat and for her feet to feel a little sore, but not so long that she’s exhausted. 

“Want to get out of here?” Levi shouts over the din of the room between a set. 

“Sure,” she agrees.

They leave the tavern and make their way through the busy cobblestone streets arm in arm. The streets are illuminated by expensive gas lamps, casting a warm glow upon them. They stop together on a bridge over the river and lean against the railing. 

Mikasa looks down as far as she can see in the night, watches the water flow forward as the river curves beyond where she can see. 

_ It goes somewhere.  _

She has to cling to that, has to remember that. This river will take them somewhere, somewhere far away from everything they’ve ever known. Far from these people, this place, their lives. 

She looks up at the night sky she so rarely sees. The light of the city dulls it slightly, but she can still see the stars, pinpricks of light in the vast darkness, just like in her dreams. 

He pulls her close to him, his arm wrapped tightly around her waist and she relaxes into the warmth of him.

“I want to see you in one of those robes.”

“Hmm?”

“Like in the book,” he elaborates, “like the woman with the sword, with the sash around the waist,” he says quietly into her ear as they look up at the sky together. 

“Is that so? Why?”

He inhales deeply then exhales and the warmth of his breath on her neck in the crisp fall air makes her shiver. 

“Don’t know,” he says. “I just want to.” 

Levi is not a man of words. It’s something she loves about him. She’s had flowery epithets filled with nothingness parroted to her for over a decade. She’s had her beauty compared to the heavens, to the trees in springtime, to exotic birds and any other number of superficial oddities. She knows that these things are hollow and meaningless. 

But right now, dreaming of a new life with Levi, his simple words and steady presence beside her she feels true happiness in a way she’d thought was impossible. 

It matters not if she is beautiful, but he makes her feel beautiful all the same. He sees her for what she is, a feeling she’d never known she needed or desired. Perhaps it’s easy for him to see this because whatever they’re made from is the same. 

“You will,” she says. “The river will take us there, and I’ll wear a hundred different robes,” she says into the night air, her words heavy with promise and light with hope. 

She leans on his shoulder and looks up at the night sky, people walk past them and a band plays off in the distance, but she and Levi may as well be alone. Nothing else matters. 

.

.

They spend the rest of the money on an expensive hotel room. It’s not as grand as many Mikasa’s clients had often booked, but it’s far nicer than anything than Levi’s ever experienced. She can see his mind buzzing as he takes in the extravagance of fine linens and scented candles. The room has a large bed and even a private bathroom, a luxury she doubts Levi has ever experienced before. 

He pulls off his coat, leaving him in his vest and shirt. She smooths her hand over his shoulders and wind around his neck. They’re alone and she’s hurting still from the confrontation with her past, but it’s tempered by the hope she feels, fragile and small but hope all the same. She wants nothing more than to prolong this feeling of togetherness, this perfect world the two of them have created that is theirs and theirs alone. Mikasa leans against him and inhales deeply, the smell of his plain soap ever present on his skin.

“I want you,” she says lowly to him as she fiddles coyly with the buttons on his vest, “I want to do as I please with you,” she breathes. 

Mikasa doesn’t know why this is important to her, why she needs to hear from him that he’s hers when she already knows it, already feels it deep inside of her the same as she does anything. 

But she needs this, needs to know that this time she’s the one in control, that his trust and devotion to her is the same as her own to him. 

“Why do you even ask?” he says, eyes already filled with want. “Just do what feels right, whatever you feel inside.” 

Levi’s words pull at her, let her look inward to the part inside of her that always knows what to do, what to think, what to feel. Where she always knows what she needs. 

She pushes him hard up against the wall and slants her mouth against his, a messy, intense kiss that’s equal parts teeth and tongue as she unbuttons his vest, then his shirt. She pulls both away and throws the garments onto the floor. 

“Take off your pants,” she demands. 

He does so and she feels her body hum at the visual of it. Everything about him, from the way he looks at her while he unbuttons his pants, the bend of his body when he takes them off, his calm expression as he stands there naked as he was born, makes her feel a burning, throbbing sensation inside of her. 

She looks at him, lets her gaze linger on all of him as he stands there bare in front of her.  From defined collarbones and hard muscles that move beneath pale, scar smattered skin he’s more beautiful than any man she’s laid eyes upon. He’s already hard from just kissing her, his swollen cock straining up towards his naval. It’s still odd to her how his desire for her makes her feel feverish instead of repulsed. 

“Go sit on the bed.” 

He does as she asks and she stands in front of him, enjoying for a moment the power she feels at being fully clothed while he is bare and vulnerable to her. There’s a dark, animal part of her that wants to see him vulnerable, wants to have him submit fully and willingly to her. 

She takes off her clothes slowly, savoring the feel of his eyes on her every movement as she casts aside her dress, undergarments and stockings until she’s naked. The way he looks at her makes her feel powerful, desired—anything but the weak, trembling woman she’d been in the past. 

Mikasa crawls onto the bed and walks on her knees until she’s straddling his face, her body laid out before him. 

“Use your mouth,” she demands of him. 

He obliges her, grabbing her by her hips and pulling her sex to his mouth. She gasps and grips the sturdy wooden headboard, rocking her hips up against his face unapologetically  until she’s sweating and spouting filthy words as he makes her come. She rolls off of him and watches as Levi wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, her wetness lingering there. He props himself up on his side and looks at her, but he doesn’t move. He knows that right now he’s to wait. 

She doesn’t feel tired; limitless energy pulses through her, so much that she can’t contain it inside her trembling body. She straddles him again sinks herself down onto his cock. He groans before she grabs him roughly by the chin and kisses him, again and again until her head is swimming in his touch, the feel of his hands on her back, the way his hips rock up into her, but it’s still not quite enough. 

“Get on top of me,” she says, her voice coming out more growl than words.

He flips her over easily and has her roughly, just how she wants. She pushes back against him and holds him tightly to her, his breathing ragged in her ear. She urges him on, asks him for everything he can give her because she wants nothing less than all of him. 

Even after he finishes he keeps going, irregular thrusts and sweat slicked skin pressed against her until he wrings her pleasure from her again, her hand clasped in his, her heels pressed into his back as she groans out his name. 

They lay there like that, her body still intertwined with his, the thrumming delirium of excised passion hanging about them for what could be a minute or an hour, the thrumming of their beating hearts the only way Mikasa knows to measure time. 

She thinks for the first time that this is the kind of moment where many would declare their love for one another, that these moments of stillness between them are meant to be filled with words of passion. She can understand that perhaps this would be a nice thing, a reassurance of shared feelings that maybe, with anyone else, she would have welcomed. But she thinks that for them, they are different, that they don’t need these words between one another. 

They are bound together through something deeper than any of her words can possibly convey, a force that she doesn’t fully understand but fully accepts as part of who she is, their devotion to one another the only thing that she can derive any meaning from any more. 

Mikasa decides that she will never tell him she loves him, partially because it is an unneeded thing and partially because the things she loves always die. 

When he rolls off of her, he sits up on the edge of the bed. Her body feels heavy and overly sensitive still, but she manages to prop herself up on her side to observe him, enjoying the view of his back muscles sliding beneath his skin as he stretches.  

He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. 

“Do you want to check out the fancy soaking tub?” 

“Sure,” she says, her voice warm with affection.

The room for the tub is nice with cool stone floor that feels solid and sturdy against her feet. Against the wall is a large tub, attached to the wall with various taps to control the flow of water. Mikasa has never closely inspected such a thing, and she supposes she’s fortunate that a client had never wanted to take a bath with her. She touches the basin out of curiosity. She can tell that it’s some sort of metal with a protective coating over it but she can’t discern exactly what it’s made of.

They mess with the complicated taps, balancing a ratio of hot and cold water until it’s just right. There are a number of scented products that are meant to go into the bath water sitting on a shelf, but Mikasa takes one sniff and her head spins from the overpowering fragrance, so they forgo them. 

“I killed a man in a soaking tub not too long ago,” Levi says as lightly as if he were discussing the weather. “It was so easy to catch him by surprise and I’d wondered how anyone could be that oblivious, but now,” he runs a hand down her arm and holds her hand, “now it makes a bit more sense.” 

Mikasa laughs and leans back against him. 

“Do you think maybe we should just try to make it here? Scrimp and save as much as we can, pull ourselves out of the pit and make a life for ourselves?” he asks her quietly.

She thinks about this, wonders what it would’ve been like if she and Levi lived a life similar to her mother and father: far away in the exterior that’s now titan-infested land, hiding from those that would seek to harm them for their differences. 

“Part of me wishes we could, that it worked that way,” she sighs, “but...isn’t it odd, that two people like us are trapped the way we are?”

“How do you mean?” 

“I think...I think there’s something different about us, something that people in power are afraid of.” 

She tells him about her encounter with Frieda Reiss, everything about her odd touch and hollow, ancient sounding words. 

“I’d been different then, softer, gentler,” Mikasa thinks back to how fragile she’d been then, subject entirely to the whims of others, “but her words still unsettle me all the same. I don’t know what she’d meant, but it was strange. She has something to do with this,” she makes a gesture with her hand, at a lost for words, “ _ feeling  _ we both have, that something big is going to happen, I just know it.”  

“What do you mean you were different?”

She hasn’t told him about this. She hasn’t told him about Kenny, and she’s knows part of her has been avoiding it, as if ignoring it will make it go away. She doesn’t want to think about how she’s still owned by someone in some sense. She also hasn’t thought on how she’s changed since it happened as it’s odd to think of herself truly any other way than how she is now. 

“Let’s get out of the bath and I’ll explain.”

They towel off and put on their bedclothes. The bed is made of fine goose down and she can tell that Levi finds it odd. He takes a few of the pillows and props himself up on the headboard and looks at her expectantly. 

“I haven’t told you much about my past, and I am grateful you haven’t tried to pry it from me, but I feel that perhaps I should’ve explained sooner,” she wrings her hands together and looks into her lap nervously. What if she sounds mad? 

“That night in the room with Frieda, there was a man there, a man by the name of Kenny Ackerman.” Levi’s eyes widen at the name and it gives her pause. “Is the name familiar to you?” 

“Yes, but finish your story first.”

Mikasa swallows nervously. 

_ Do they know one another? I suppose it’s possible, even likely.  _

“Frieda said, after she touched me, that she suspected I was like him. I’m not entirely sure what she meant exactly, but there are undeniable similarities between Kenny and myself,” she pauses and thinks for a moment before she speaks. 

“The night of that meeting when I was back at the bordello Kenny came to me. He threatened me, he made me believe he was trying to kill me...and I think he would have even, were it not for...” she pauses, searching for the words to describe what she’d felt that night.

“It was like...in a moment I was somehow alive for the very first time. Suddenly a great power welled up inside of me, I was overcome with a need to survive, to fight...it was stunning. I fought back and it seemed as if that was what he’d been hoping for.”

“I’d heard that he’d been spotted down below,” Levi says calmly, but the tension in his body betrays him, “and when I’d heard that Bauer died the same night, I’d suspected that you were involved with him.” 

“And you didn’t ask?” 

“Of course not,” he says mildly. “Pasts are a difficult thing. It wasn’t my place.”

She has to resist the urge to reach out and touch him, the kindness that he shows her with these small gestures still a bit surprising to her after years of nothing at all, but she knows if she touches him now she won’t want to continue the conversation. 

“After that, Kenny took me away, down below even the Underground and taught me how to fight, how to kill...but it’d been easy,” she’s quiet now, barely above a whisper as she puts words to her secrets, “it was like somewhere inside I knew all of these things, that my body was suddenly under my complete control after that night...and now I work for him, indebted to him for freeing me. I traded one master for another.”

Levi sighs and rests his forearm on his bent knee.

“To start, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I also had a moment like you described, and I know for a fact that Kenny did as well. I was a child, and it was as if suddenly,” he searches for the words, his eyes distant as he remembers, “something just fell into place and I knew what I had to do. I have ever since...and Kenny,” he looks at her, “Kenny took me in after my mother died. He taught me everything I know. Left when I was about twelve, and then I heard later that he’d ended up in charge of some cops.”

Levi looks away from he, his jaw clenched slightly. She reaches out to take his hand and he flinches slightly before he relaxes into her touch. He tries to hide it, but Mikasa can feel the hurt that he feels over being left behind. 

She feels almost relieved that he knows what she’s speaking of. She would’ve accepted that she were some sort of freak, a monster disguised as a woman, even happily since it freed her from her life as a whore, but sharing this experience with someone else is more than she could’ve hoped for. 

“The other thing worth noting is that Kenny and I have the same surname, Ackerman.” 

She looks at him expectantly and he shrugs.

“I never had a surname. It’s always been Levi. Just Levi.” 

The idea that he’s been alone so long pains her. She doesn’t say anything, but she moves close to him and rests her head on his shoulder, wrapping his arm around her waist as she sighs. He runs a hand through her hair gently, clearly lost in thought. They sit like that in comfortable silence for a while.

Now there are no secrets between the two of them. 

“You’re right,” he says quietly as he turns off the gas lamp and they snuggle together beneath the blankets. “We have to leave the walls.”

“Mm,” she agrees as she takes his hand in her own, “but it’s okay.”

She closes her eyes and drifts into that place between waking and dreams, a place where reality still exists but is slightly blurred.

“Someday we’ll lie together beneath the stars.”

She knows it’s far too flowery of a thing for Levi to say, but she hears it in his voice and that alone is enough. 

Mikasa is in a field of grass. It’s tall and brushes against her knee and doesn’t end, continuing as far as her eye can see. The sun is warm and beautiful on her skin. She’s dressed simply in a light robe made of cotton with a tie around the waist. It’s a strange shade that is neither blue nor purple that she doesn’t have the word to describe, and woven into the fabric with white is a wave like pattern up the hem. 

Levi is there with her, smiling as she’s never seen before. It’s a full grin that lights his eyes as he reaches for her hand. They walk through the grass, the stalks tickling their intertwined hands.

Overhead a feathered snake with the snout of a dog flies across the sky. It roars a deep, vital sound that makes her shiver. The creature releases a plume of fire, and from the fire a bird with feathers of gold emerges. She and Levi watch as the bird and the snake fly upward, into the sky that is somehow both lit with sun and filled with stars. 

Levi gasps and she sees red blood bloom on his chest, spreading on his shirt until the whole thing is red, red, red, and staining her fingers. 

Mikasa holds him and weeps, his blood staining not-blue jacket red. 

A small, blonde woman is there with them in the grass.

“Help me! He’s dying,” Mikasa cries to her through her sobs. 

The small woman simply looks at her, clear, angelic eyes blank as she stares back, her gaze burning. She extends both her hands and the grass around them catches fire. Mikasa tries to run but it’s too much, it closes in on them. 

The flames eat away at their clothes until their bodies are nothing but ash, floating upward into the night. From here Mikasa can see the world, a vast expanse of land and water. 

She sees three small circles on an island. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, and we are nearing the end of this story. It'll all end up here eventually, sorry for the inconsistent updates. Warring with lack of motivation, fandom burnout and an increasingly busy real life.

Mikasa can’t help but feel slightly relieved to be in the Underground again. The general disrepair of the streets, the poor, even the dank smell of stagnant water...it’s terrible, disgusting, even, but at the very least it’s honest.

She has shared herself with Levi completely and it’s something she doesn’t think she can turn back from.

Their night above ground had been wonderful, beautiful, comforting, but it was in many ways a fantasy; an illusion of freedom and choice that no one who lives inside these walls can truly experience.

So she welcomes the cracked paint and uneven floorboards of Levi’s home. Inside she feels a creeping, ominous sensation, the tension of the world so much that it’s as if the walls themselves are closing in upon them.

They decide together that they will leave in two weeks time. That gives them the time to gather supplies but is still soon enough that they aren’t lingering.

Between them is a quiet hope, a longing for this dream they’ve created together to become reality.

“I have to go back to the bunker,” Mikasa says, “Kenny wanted me back there around this time,” she thinks on his threat if she tried to flee, “and I don’t want to miss him.”

The implication is clear. Kenny is a dangerous man, even to the both of them, and outright defiance is not going to go well. He can’t suspect that she’s leaving, not until they’re long gone.

Still, she can tell Levi is irritated as she readies herself to leave.

“What’s wrong?” she asks him.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t lie,” she says shortly.

He shrugs. “I just don’t like the idea of you going off alone and dealing with perhaps the only person I know of that would be trouble in a fight.”

He doesn’t say it, but his meaning is clear: he’s not sure if either of them are capable of surviving a fight with Kenny.

She’s glad he takes Kenny that seriously. He’s a dangerous man, and one who taught the both of them everything they know. She takes his hand into hers gently, a calming gesture for the both of them.

“I’ll get a feel for the situation, see where things are at and we can move forward accordingly. It’ll be okay, I promise.”

At these words she feels it for the first time, a creeping, cloying sense of doubt and foreboding that makes her worry. But she pushes it aside. If she can’t trust herself, if she can’t believe in Levi then she has nothing.

.

.

The bunker smells of stale air and the candle smoke when she steps down. Instead of finding darkness, Kenny is there waiting for her. He’s sitting in the chair, his long legs kicked up on the table and bored as he twiddles a toothpick in between his teeth.

“I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour, where’ve ya been, Mikasa?”

Her heart jumps into her throat, as if Kenny can somehow hear her thoughts and sense her impending betrayal. She would feel guilty if she hadn’t spent all of her life ashamed of being alive, but she has no time for such things anymore.

“I was out for a walk.”

He looks her up and down, as if sensing for any kind of deception, but then shoves his hands in his pockets when satisfied.

“It’s time we have a talk about the state of the world,” he tosses _The Subjects of Ymir_ onto the table, “ya read this thing, right?”

She nods shortly.

“Have ya noticed that things just seem...off, lately?”

“Yes,” she says as she takes off her coat and sits down at the table. His eyes flicker with something akin to amusement.

“I expected ya would, considering everything. It’s time for a bit of family history.”

He tells her of a man named Uri and how he had been the true king of the walls, that the true royal family remains hidden from all but the closest of advisors. He was a man who could shift from a man to a titan with powers unlike any he’d seen before. The idea scares Mikasa. She’d read about this, but having her suspicions confirmed as true is another thing entirely.

_It’s really true, this whole world is a lie._

If someone could turn into a titan, there’s no reason for them to be living in fear like this.

“He tried to use an ability on me, a power to alter memories but it doesn’t work on people like us, or Asians for that matter, so it seems you’re double special,” he add flippantly, “a long time ago, our people, the Ackermans and the Asians that is, decided they didn’t want to serve the royal family, so that’s why we’ve all been shoved down here in this pit...until I met Uri,” Kenny laughs, a gentle glow of nostalgia settling over him that Mikasa finds odd on such a violent man, “well, when I discovered ‘im I thought he was gonna kill me, but instead he spared me, so I dedicated myself to following him. I could just feel it, that kind of power…” Kenny’s grins, an unsettling mockery of a smile, “it’s intoxicating.”

Mikasa keeps her expression neutral, but she’s breaking out into a sweat just listening to him talk. The way he speaks terrifies her.

“Well, Uri got sick,” Kenny reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a box made of heavy, dark wood with a golden latch, “so it was his time.”

He opens the box and inside is a syringe filled with a golden liquid.

“This serum, it turns ya into a mindless titan.”

Mikasa’s eyes widen and she backs away, as if being around it is dangerous enough.

“Why would anyone want that? You’re saying people aren’t simply...born with this ability? That Titans are….humans??”

The thought makes Mikasa feel sick. She’s never seen a titan, but she’s heard stories and seen pictures, and the very notion is terrifying.

He laughs, a rude, barking sound. “Of course not. I don’t know how all those dumb fucks roaming outside the walls got here, but they were people alright,” his expression goes from amused to grave, a glimmer of madness in his eyes that makes Mikasa’s skin turn to gooseflesh, “but when a mindless titan eats someone with the ability to turn into a titan, they take their power.”  


“And that’s what I’m gonna do. Yer a smart girl, I bet ya can guess by now who I gotta eat.”

She thinks back to Frieda, how she’d touched her, how she’d felt ancient and young simultaneously.

“Lady Frieda,” Mikasa whispers.

“That’s right,” Kenny says. He’s almost doting, as if he’s proud of her for making the connection. “Well, she’s sick, and that feeling you have,” he reaches across the table and pokes her chest, “it’s because they’re planning on doing their family ceremony. A little over every decade, the Reiss family transfers their titan power to another in the family. You can feel it inside, something about us Ackermans and maybe Asians fer all I know, we can sense that kind of power. They’re fixin’ to have one a’ Rod’s bastards take the power, but that’s where you and I come in.”

Kenny closes the box and stows it in his breast pocket. Then he stands up, drawing himself to his full height as he looms over her.

“I’m gonna inject myself with this, go down below into the Reiss chapel and devour Frieda Reiss, and yer gonna help me.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

The words come out of her mouth before she can stop them, quiet and barely more than a whisper and just as quick she’s struck across the face so hard she falls out of her chair and onto the ground, her vision blacking out for a moment and head spinning as she spits out blood.

Kenny picks her up roughly by her dress and shoves her against the wall.

“You’ll do best to remember yer place, Mikasa. Maybe I’ve been too nice to ya cos I’m getting sentimental in my old age and ya reminded me of my sweet dead sister,” he leans in close to her, she can smell old tobacco on his breath, “but without me you’d still be a sad, pretty oriental whore, cryin’ into ‘er pillow at night,” he drops her and she stumbles, her head still spinning from the blow to her head.

He starts to leave and looks at her, his gaze alone enough to hold her in her place.

“Three days and yer comin’ with me out to Wall Rose, don’t bother trying ta think otherwise.”

He leaves but she still feels the weight of his presence weighing down on her until she can hardly breathe. Her heart pounds in her chest as she tries to catch her breath.

She doesn’t know how long she spends collecting herself on the ground, but when she finally calms herself she grabs her few belongings and rushes out the door.

.

.

“This is a good job Mr. Levi, you should take it,” Ari insists as he pushes the paper across the table.

“I shouldn’t have let you in if you were just going to lecture me on the work I do. You should still be sitting pretty from that big job last month, and I’ve been giving you your usual fee for all the information you get.”

The young boy had all but banged a hole in his door before Levi had finally let him in, and for the first time Levi is seriously considering clocking the boy.

Ari rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet nervously, a trait that the precocious boy doesn’t normally exhibit.

“Is something wrong? Are you in a tight spot?” Levi takes a wad of cash and offers it to Ari. The boy shakes his head and turns away.

“That woman you’re going with! She’s bad news!”

Levi stops mid step.

“What are you talking about?” he asks lowly.

“The pretty one you’ve been sneaking around with,” Ari spits out, “she runs with dangerous folks, ones like–”

“I know about Kenny Ackerman,” Levi says, “and it’s best if you take your own advice, stay away, and stay out of my business,” Levi grabs Ari firmly by the wrist and shoves the wad of cash into his hand.

“Get out of here, don’t come back.”

It’s best this way, as much as it pains him to leave Ari to the world, Levi has other things on the horizon.

“But Mr. Levi I–”

“ _Leave._ ”

Levi doesn’t raise his voice or yell, but Ari’s face pales and eyes glass over a little, the tough street urchin trying and failing to hold back tears. Ari goes to the door and lingers, his shoulder slumping before he says “I’m sorry, Levi,” then leaves.

 _Sorry?_  

What does Ari have to be sorry for? Levi sighs and pours himself a glass of water, noting to himself that he’s running low on drinking water and needs to go to the pump sooner rather than later.

He downs the glass and sets it down on the counter. He leans against the counter and sighs, the quiet of the room weighing down upon him, thick and stifling.

He wishes Mikasa were here. Levi dislikes the feeling of wanting someone the way he wants her in many ways. Sometimes he doesn’t recognize himself, doesn’t understand how one person could shift his world so much in such a short amount of time.

But there’s just something different now, a feeling he can’t shake, and if he’s honest he doesn’t want to. It feels too good, too natural, too easy to want her, need her, have her.

He couldn’t name exactly what it is, but everything with her just seems _right_ in a way that nothing else ever has. It makes sense to him.

Not for the first time he thinks that this all is futile, that it’s going to blow up in their faces catastrophically, but the best thing is he doesn’t care. This escape, the invincible feeling he has when he thinks about the future is something he’s never felt before. So he clings to it, treasures it, and chases it with everything he is.

He can dream with her.

There’s a knock on the door – the distinctive knock that Mikasa uses. He moves to answer it, as he’s unlocking the locks she knocks again, impatient.

He opens the door and she rushes in past him, hair tousled and chest heaving as if she’d been running, sprinting the whole distance.

“We have to leave, we have to leave!”

“Mikasa,” he rests a hand on her shoulder but she shakes him off and paces about the room.

“It’s Kenny,” she’s bordering on hysterics, her eyes wide and scared like an animal in a trap, “we have to go sooner, as soon as possible!”

“Okay, okay,” he says warily, simply trying to get her to calm down enough to explain herself, “but you need to calm down enough to explain to me–”

She shoves him against the wall and presses her mouth to his hungrily, a hand twisted in his hair and another already working the buttons on his shirt.

_No, this is ridiculous._

“Mikasa,” he insists “we should talk,” he says, though his resolve is starting to waver.

His words seem to have reached her. She shakes her head.

“You’re right, I’m sorry, I’m being an idiot,” she wipes at her eyes and shakes her head, willing herself not to cry. Levi’s chest tightens. He wants to reach out to her, to put a hand on her shoulder but it’s still hard, even for her to express himself so freely.

Instead, he gets her a glass of water and pulls out the wobbly chair at the table. She sits, sighing heavily.

He sits down at the table across from her.

“Just tell me what’s happened,” he says measuredly.

“It’s Kenny, he’s gone completely mad,” she says, her voice trembling as she speaks, “he says that in order to become a titan changing human, one must first be a mindless titan and then,” she inhales shakily, “and then devour another titan changing human. The Lady Frieda Reiss I told you about is one such person, she’s the true Queen of the walls. That nervous feeling we have inside, that’s because the Reiss family is about to transfer her power to another member of their family, but Kenny plans to steal it from them and become a titan himself.”

Levi’s eyes widen and his knees feel weak, so much so that he has to sit down. Mikasa sits down across from him at the wobbly table, face blank and distant.

“When is this supposed to happen?”

“Three days.”

Levi nods.

“You’re right. We need to leave before this happens.”

There’s no way that Kenny would allow either of them to leave if he achieves this kind of power, and Levi doesn’t consider fighting their way out from him an option.

He looks at her, her grey eyes solemn and resolved as she nods.

The air in the room changes, an almost sick, twisting feeling that makes him fight the urge to shift his weight in his seat. Perhaps it’s their choice, that leaving has now become a reality instead of a dream but it weighs on him.

“Tomorrow, as the sun sets,” she says.

Tomorrow it is.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry.

Levi can’t sleep.

Sleep has never come easily to him, not for as long as he can remember, at least. He finds it difficult to quiet his mind, his thoughts racing away until he falls into something of a fitful sleep. Mikasa has helped this in some ways, though not in the classical, romantic sense. Her presence is nice, the smell of her is soothing, but he’s not quite romantic enough for that to calm his troubled mind.

Rather it’s counting her breaths he finds comforting. One….two...three….four, usually up to a hundred before he tires enough to sleep. The sound soothes him and the task usually lulls him to sleep.

Tonight he’s counted her breaths past five hundred, lost count, and then counted again to three hundred before giving up. 

He doesn’t know how she manages to sleep so deeply. He knows she feels it too, the same heaviness around them, not to mention he knows that she has strange, vivid dreams that she never discusses with him. If it were him, he’d probably never sleep again. 

The room is dark but for the lamplight from the street outside filtering in through the threadbare blanket he’s hung in the window. Mikasa sleeps on her back, so he can see her profile easily.

She’s somewhat stern, even in sleep, the corners of her mouth tight in an almost frown, her long, dark eyelashes resting upon the apples of her cheeks. If he didn’t know better he’d swear she paints them with something.  The scar beneath her cheekbone is still slightly red, though it has faded slightly since he’s known her. 

When she is awake Mikasa always seems a little bit sad. It never truly leaves her, and he wishes that that weren’t so though he can’t blame her for it. 

_ Leaving is the right choice. _

Levi has lost track of how many times he’s told himself this. It’s odd for him to question a decision after it’s been made. Really he’s not sure if he ever has. He’s always tried to live by his choices, and stand by them once they are made.

_ If Kenny actually succeeds at coming into such power there’s no chance for escape.  _

Mikasa deserves a place where she isn’t a commodity, merely a rare thing to be bought and sold for the enjoyment of others, or even a tool to be used. She deserves to exist by herself, for herself. And that can never happen here in these walls. 

Levi brushes his finger against her cheek without thinking about it. She remains still as he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, enjoying the warmth of her skin and the unique coarseness of her hair.

He’s not sure freedom exists for anyone. Perhaps the burden of existence alone is too much for anyone to bear, that every individual is born into debt that they can never repay by virtue of being given life. 

But if he doesn’t try he knows he’s a coward. He knows there’s a world out there, and all they have to do is take it.

With Mikasa, he thinks maybe they have a shot. 

“Pretty thing, isn’t she?” 

Levi’s reaches for his switchblade on the nightstand, flinging it open with the press of a finger. Kenny is there, crawling in the window and pointing a gun directly at him.

“Ah, I wouldn’t do that,”  Kenny says lightly, scooting himself off the windowsill and drawing himself to his full height, looming over them both ominously. 

“Levi? What’s–” Mikasa’s words catch in her throat at the sight of Kenny, eyes wide as she reaches and grabs Levi’s free hand. 

“I expected better of the both of ya, but especially you, Levi, I never pegged you as the type to fall for a warm place to stick yerself, but here we are,” he says, his tone deceptively light for a man aiming a loaded gun directly at him, “by the way, you oughtta choose yer business associates more wisely. That little street urchin of yer’s was easy to crack. He told me the both a ya were plannin’ on busting outta here once I threatened his ma. Orphans are a better choice, less to leverage and more disposable.”

_ I’m sorry.  _

Ari’s goodbye makes sense now. Levi wants to feel anger but he can’t, he knows that Ari stood no chance against someone like Kenny.

If he’s fast enough he could likely make it to Kenny before he fires his weapon, but it’d be impossible to guarantee that he wouldn’t shoot Mikasa. So Levi sits there, muscles tensed and ready to lunge but nowhere to go.

“What do you want Kenny?” 

Levi’s voice comes out measured and cool, but  his heart pounds against his ribcage, his blood pulsing through his veins as everything inside of him begs him to move.

Kenny looks at him, teeth bared and eyes glimmering with madness. 

“What I want is what I’ve always wanted.  _ Power _ ,” he says the word with the tenderness of a lover and the reverence of an acolyte,  “It’s what I taught you to value above all other things, and clearly, ya just don’t wanna learn.”

“What do either of us have to do with that?” Mikasa asks, barely keeping fear out of her voice. Kenny leers at her and takes a step closer to the bed. He’s no longer aiming the gun at them, but rather twirling it boredly. 

“If ya haven’t gathered this by now I’m disappointed, but all three of us, we have something in common. I’ll never forget it myself, that moment where I tasted it,” Kenny’s eyes brighten with pleasure at the memory, “that sweet power deep inside,” he clenches his

free hand and thumps his chest, “I could do anythin’ I needed to, anythin’ I  _ wanted  _ to. And I know you both felt it too, I got t’see it happen for the both of ya. Fills me with a lot of pride.” Kenny’s voice is wistful for a moment, the feeling clearly genuine. 

Levi remembers being small. He doesn’t remember why, or even how, but suddenly something changed, something that had always been inside of him stirred to life by need and will. 

“That’s right, yer rememberin’ it too. I found you, a tiny little thing clinging t’my sweet, dumb, sister’s corpse like a teddy bear and I took you in.”

_ Sister!  _

The word repeats over and over in his head as things slowly fall into place. Levi’s eyes widen and his hand trembles so much that he nearly drops his knife. 

“That’s right, that makes me yer dear uncle,” Kenny sneers, “and yer full name is Levi Ackerman. This one,” Kenny nods toward Mikasa, “she’s good at keeping secrets, any good whore is. Got a pretty oriental first name, but I dunno if y’know ‘er last name is also Ackerman, so this is a nice little family reunion fer all of us. Don’t worry too much about how you’ve been stickin’ it to ‘er, her family was sent away to the exterior decades ago,” he smiles wickedly, “and she’s probably got enough of that fancy oriental blood that it’s not too disgusting,” he mocks.  

Levi’s stomach turns. It makes sense, the sameness between the three of them was too much to dismiss as coincidence. 

“Our family has been wiped out, pushed aside for over a hundred years for not fallin’ in line, for not buttoning our lips to this titan family,” Kenny scowls, “the three of us are all that’s left. I’ll tell ya, it’s all coming to an end. I will become a titan and finally know true peace.”

“You don’t need the both of us for that, neither of us care about titan powers or families–”

“That’s not the point! The both a’you  _ owe  _ me! ” Kenny roars, teeth barred like a feral dog, eyes wide with fury.  

“It’s easy for us to lose focus of things that matter, devotion to another is a powerful thing, I sympathize, I’ve felt it before too...it’s easy to lose yerself in that, when doin’ something for someone else feels better than doin’ things for yerself...cos that’s all yer’ feeling right now. It’s another strange thing. I bet things feel good for ya, that things are easy when yer together, mm?” 

He shares a glance with Mikasa, he can see her fear beneath her facade of detachment. He still feels it, that he needs to help her, to be with her, to help her, no matter what the cost. 

“Yeah, I remember that feelin’ too. So let me lay it out for you,” faster than Levi’s eyes can track Kenny’s at the side of the bed and holding his gun to Mikasa’s head, “If I have to, I’ll blow ‘er brains out right ‘ere, just to make listenin’ to me a little easier for ya.  I understand how these kinds of things can get in the way of rational thinking.” 

“No!” Levi says, unable to keep the fear completely out of his voice, “you don’t need to do that.” 

Mikasa grabs Kenny’s wrist and explodes upward out of the bed, her head smashing into Kenny’s face as she tackles him to the floor. Kenny’s gun fires once into the wall as he struggles against Mikasa.

“Levi RUN!” Mikasa shouts. Levi springs off the bed, ready to slash his switchblade across Kenny’s throat but he’s not quick enough. Kenny overpowers Mikasa, shakes her grip and hits her upside the head with the handle of the pistol hard enough she flies into the wall.

Kenny spins the pistol and fires it at Levi. Levi dodges, but the bullet lodges itself in his calf muscle, bringing him to his knees. 

“If ya do that again I’ll kill ‘im, right now!”

Levi stands but he can’t put any weight on the leg, his knee buckling when he tries.

“No!” Mikasa cries, her voice broken and pained, “don’t kill him,  _ please,”  _ she pleads, tears streaming down her face as she begs for his life, “let him go, I’ll do whatever, just leave him!”

“Mikasa–”

“It’s okay, Levi,” she says resolutely. She stands up on trembling feet. Levi clutches at wound on his leg, trying to staunch the bleeding. 

Kenny looks at her, expression stern as he holsters the gun. He kicks open the bedroom door and waits.

Mikasa looks at him, her face drawn and dark but eyes brimming with tears. 

“Goodbye, Levi,” she whispers. 

She follows Kenny into the darkness.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen to  this

Mikasa looks around at the forest. The ground is covered in leaves, brown and crisp in the late autumn. Still there are bushy pine trees that grow so close together that the area surrounding the clearing is covered in shadow.

She crosses her arms and leans against the side of the cabin. She tucks the black scarf she’s wearing closer around her neck, both to keep the chill of the air at bay and to calm her nerves. The new gear she’s wearing is odd. She’s never worn maneuvering gear. It’s very functional, outfitted with guns and bullets. Despite this Mikasa still thinks that she prefers the knife she keeps tucked into her waistband.

On the outside Mikasa is stoic. She is a stone, capable of weathering the world until she is nothing.

But inside she grieves.

She should have known that they wouldn’t have been able to escape. She should have known that they’d created an illusion together and that _this_ is the reality.

Yet she grieves for her dream. She thinks of Levi, of his eyes when she’d left him for the last time on the ground clutching his bleeding leg.

The cabin door opens and Kenny sticks his head out.

“Mikasa, inside.”

She follows him in.

This cabin is humble and small, but the entire Reiss family is huddled together inside of it. The atmosphere is strange and bittersweet. Lady Frieda sits in a bed, her small body tucked beneath a colorful quilt. She looks like a different person than when Mikasa had first met her. Where her dark hair had once been lustrous and thick it is now limp and dull, where her cheeks had once been rosy and beautiful her complexion is sallow.

On the bed with her is a smaller woman, snuggled up into Frieda’s arms as she cries. Frieda’s face is kind as she strokes her hair.

“It’s okay to cry, sister,” Frieda says into her hair. She kisses her on the forehead, “but don’t despair for too long.”

“How can you say that?”

The crying girl pulls away from her sister and Mikasa has to hold back her shock.

It’s the woman from her dream. Her expression is different, tragically beautiful in her grief with kind blue eyes meeting her sister’s.

Frieda raises a trembling hand to her sister’s cheek soothingly, the effort from this alone seems as if it’s too much and she will faint. Frieda presses her forehead to her sister’s.

Rod Reiss crosses his arms and frowns but says nothing. Mikasa can sense his displeasure radiating off of him, but even fathers must defer to their queenly daughters.

“Because I will never leave you, Historia. It’s why I chose you instead of the others. We will be together forever, connected beyond the constraints of time,” the Reiss family bristles at Frieda’s words but say nothing as she continues, “it is hard to explain now, but you will understand very soon,” Frieda says so quietly that Mikasa has to strain to hear it.

Mikasa feels uncomfortable witnessing such a tender moment and has to fight the urge to leave. The warmth and love between the two sisters seems strange considering what is going to transpire this evening.

Or at least, what the Reiss family thinks will transpire this evening.  

Kenny is trusted to a degree that almost surprises Mikasa. The Reiss family didn’t question her presence even slightly when Kenny reintroduced her as his protege, and she is certain that none of them suspect his plot to overthrow them.

Mikasa has no specific role in this plan of Kenny’s. She is certain that Kenny’s insistence on her help is more about exerting control over her. Kenny is strong enough to slaughter these pretty nobles in rapid succession, and the Lady Frieda looks so weak and palid Mikasa suspects that her titan power would also be useless.

No, Kenny’s control over her is about pride. He feels proud to have made such a useful tool rather than actually needing for her strength.

She glances over at him, expression grim as he leans against the wall of the cabin. He almost looks a little weary.

Despite everything, Mikasa can’t bring herself to hate Kenny Ackerman. For better or worse he made her into what she is today. She mourns her dream, her life she’d planned with Levi, but it was a childish dream. Maybe Kenny has saved her in some way by teaching her to fall in line. He may have killed her dream, but a life of service to Kenny Ackerman is better than the life of a whore.

The setting sun streams into the room, painting the walls orange.

“Leave us,” Frieda says coldly to the rest of the room, voice hollow and ancient as it had been that night so long ago, “I would like to ready myself for the evening with my sister.”

The Reiss family files out of the cabin. Rod Reiss glares at his fair haired daughter, stilled curled up on the bed with her sister.  Mikasa wonders why he seems to hate his young daughter, but she has no doubt that he does by how he looks at her. His loathing is palpable. She thinks it an injustice for a father to hate his child, and even if her own father is dead Mikasa is thankful to have experienced his love.

She thinks of Levi again before she can stop herself, her heart so heavy that she can hardly contain it. She dismisses the thought so she won’t cry, not in front of these people.

Kenny looks at Mikasa and nods towards the door.  

Outside is Traute Carven. She straightens up her posture as Kenny approaches. Her admiration and devotion to Kenny is easy to sense, the way she looks at him alone enough for Mikasa to know that Traute Carven would die for him without hesitation.

Traute shoots her a glare but Mikasa ignores it. She doesn’t know if Traute is aware that it’d been her stealing the book on that rainy night, but Traute surely _does_ remember the time that Mikasa had summarily knocked her unconscious down in the bunker.

“Is everything ready?” Kenny asks Traute gruffly.

“All units surround the chapel from all sides, spread a kilometer out as per your orders, sir.”

Kenny puts a hand on Traute’s shoulder. “Good work, I don’t know exactly what they’re up to, but it’s imperative that the Reiss family isn’t messed with at all this evening. Mikasa and I will guard outside the chapel, should the rest of you fail for any reason.”

Traute doesn’t question him. She looks at him admiringly, a certain sweetness on her normally severe face before she maneuvers back into the woods. Kenny watches after her for a moment before he turns to Mikasa.

The sun is nearly set and the clearing near the chapel is beautiful in the twilight.

“Over a decade ago, a man tried to do exactly what I will do tonight. He failed obviously, but that’s why we have all this caution with the anti-personnel squad,” he explains, “funny thing for you, he’s the same man that filed the report about your parents.”

Mikasa’s eyes widen.

“The doctor?”

“Mm,” he nods as he spins his gun idly, “he was another one, a man who could shift himself into a titan...but he failed.”

Mikasa doesn’t know what to do with this knowledge. The doctor had been a kind man...to think he’d had such a power is baffling. He’d been the one to ease her growing pains, to bring her willow’s bark when she’d had a fever...to think he’d also had such monstrous power is unsettling.

_How many people are simply monsters in hiding?_

She, Levi, and Kenny are some such monsters, she thinks. It’s no wonder the Reiss family slaughtered their people for their disobedience.

“I bet you find yourself confused why I want to do this,” Kenny kicks at the grass boredly, “but I’m not so different from you...I have a dream as well...I just want to be free.”

He doesn’t say anything else to her, simply leaves her wondering as he walks toward the chapel. His words fill her with a sense of foreboding. The world is stretched thin, a thread pulled tight right before the point of breaking.

Historia is the woman from her dream...she knows it. She’s thankful that Levi isn’t here, so at the very least whatever happens he won’t be harmed.

She looks up into the sky, now darkening to a deep violet before dark, the evening stars merely white pinpricks in the painted sky. The wind blows through her hair and she thinks about both Kenny and Levi.  

_Perhaps freedom is too much...even for dreams._

Maybe no one is ever free. Mikasa has felt at times that she’s always looking back at the past, trapped and wishing she could change one thing. With Levi, she’d always looked to the future, and while it’d made her happier, perhaps it was the same thing. Maybe she can only hope to exist in each moment and anything else is merely stolen time.

The chapel is small and peaceful. Despite the tension Mikasa still feels, feels a small amount of comfort from the space. The rafters are wooden. Colored light filters in through the stained glass windows and motes of dust swirl mesmerizingly as the sun sets.

There are only a few pews, which makes sense as the chapel is meant only for the Reiss family.

_How is a titan going to fit in here?_

Mikasa doesn’t have time to wonder. The Reiss family enters the chapel. Each of them are dressed in white. Rod is first, followed by his children. Frieda is carried by her eldest brother, too weak to walk, and last to enter the chapel is Historia. Her face is stern and hard, but Mikasa can see in her eyes that it’s merely a show put on for the sake of bravery.

Each of them are solemn and wordless as they kneel before the altar. On the altar is a basin of water that Rod washes his hands in. After he dries his hands he clasps them and closes his eyes for a brief moment.

Mikasa and Kenny look on, distinctly outsiders witnessing an old tradition that feels somehow beautiful to her despite the fact that it is all prelude to what is essentially a human sacrifice.

Mikasa glances at Kenny, his face stoic but a glimmer of excitement in his eyes.

The sun sets, leaving the chapel dark but for a gas lamp. Rod pushes the altar, revealing a hole in the ground. Light shines up, bathing the chapel in light unlike any Mikasa has ever seen before, refracting across Rod’s face as he looks down below.

“Kenny, you and your subordinates wait here until the ceremony is complete as always.”

The children follow their father down below. Historia is the last to climb down, her small bare feet careful as she descends below. She looks at Mikasa for a moment, her kind blue eyes glimmering with fear before she is gone.

Mikasa’s heart twists, an unsettling sadness filling her at the knowledge of what will happen.

“They do this every month on the full moon,” Kenny says when he’s sure the Reiss family is far below, “and we set out and watch every night since the incident years ago,” Kenny reaches into his coat, touching what Mikasa is certainly the titan-serum for reassurance.

“We’ll follow them down in a bit...it’s a big, crystal cavern, larger than you’d ever imagine, we’ll have to maneuver to catch up to them. But when we do, you’ll kill all of the Reiss family while I use the serum on myself. Make sure that the little blonde one doesn’t have a chance to use the serum, y’hear?”

Mikasa swallows, dread filling her. She’s killed plenty of people at this point, enjoyed it even...but they’d all been men, and men of the worst kind. Rich, arrogant, noble...it’d been easy to feel like she’d been delivering justice.

But that doesn’t seem entirely true in this scenario, especially for the bastard Historia. Mikasa remembers how Historia had held her sister and cried earlier. There is a kindness about her that Mikasa thinks the world would be worse without.

Kenny looks at her. His cold eyes that are so similar to Levi’s boring into her. She wonders how she hadn’t noticed their familial resemblance until now, because now that she knows it’s so obvious, despite their difference in stature.  

“I hope you’re not having any doubts, Mikasa,” Kenny says, voice low and threatening, “I _will_ succeed tonight, with or without your help. But know that if you don’t do as I say, I will make life miserable for you, and then I’ll kill you.”

She thinks of Levi and nods. If her servitude is required to keep him safe, perhaps that’s the best thing she can do. The thought soothes her slightly, though she can already feel Historia Reiss’ blood on her hands.

Kenny checks his watch.

“Alright, it’s time we–”

“Captain Ackerman!”

It’s Traute outside, but her words are cut off by a sick, gurgling, choking noise. Mikasa’s hair stands on end, she hears struggle. Kenny’s eyes widen when the chapel door opens in time for them to see Traute fall to the ground, clearly dead.

Levi is standing there, covered in blood that looks like it mostly belongs to others, though if he fought his way through the entire forest she’d be surprised if he wasn’t injured. He limps slightly as he walks into the chapel, his expression all of the cool, restrained fury she remembers from the night they’d met in Lord Inocencio’s chambers.

He ejects the blade he’d been using, letting it tumble to the ground with a clatter and draws two fresh ones–the last she can see, out of the cartridges on his side.

“Levi! What are you doing here?! Leave!” Mikasa yells. She’s angry that he’s here. He needs to be far, far away from all of this.

“We’re done. Me and Mikasa. We’re not living under your agenda, or anyone else’s anymore,” he points the blade at Kenny and Mikasa shivers.

Kenny starts to laugh, first softly but then louder, until he’s doubled over and wiping tears from his eyes. The sight alone makes Mikasa feel sick to her stomach.

The three of them are standing together, equidistant to one another. Kenny’s expression is calm but his body is tense, every bit the animal stalking his prey he is. Levi is the same, Mikasa can sense his murderous intent easily in the air.

“After all this time,” Kenny says after he’s gathered himself, “I’ve seen it time and time again,” Kenny draws his pistol and aims it at Levi, “every person I’ve ever seen, it’s always something. Money, family, love,” he glances between the two of them almost amusedly, “even myself, you gotta wonder why I’ve been doing all of this, and it’s the same as what you two are up to. I just want to feel _free_. I have to chase this, I have to otherwise...what’s the point, even? Of all of this?” 

Levi looks at her. For a moment it’s just them in the room. She can feel their promise between them, about how they’d agree to chase whatever freedom they could together. Then Levi looks to Kenny, expression one of mute horror.

_What–_

The gun fires twice, but not at Levi. At her.

She jerks to move but it’s not quick enough. Levi crashes into her, his normally calculated and restrained movement clumsy and animal with panic.

Kenny’s eyes are wide as they fall, a moment of shock and even horror offering a moment of hesitation that’s enough for her to draw her own weapon and fire twice, a bullet landing in Kenny’s throat and another on his shoulder.

They crash to the ground with a thud, Levi’s weight knocking the air from her as they land in a messy splay of limbs.

Kenny collapses to his knees, clutching his throat as hot red blood sprays about him. She watches as the life spills from him as he gasps, collapsing to his side. Mikasa can see his expression shift from panic to resignation, his mouth moving as he silently says his final words to himself, a prayer for a man with no Gods but his own power. His body suddenly goes still, cold blue eyes looking up for the peace he’d never found in life.

She stands up from the ground, hands trembling.

Mikasa looks behind her. There’s one bullet in the wall behind them.

But Kenny had fired twice.

Mikasa looks over to Levi. He presses his hand tentatively to his stomach, his palm stained red as he looks down at it.

_“Levi!”_

Her voice comes out broken and cracking as she catches him before he stumbles to the ground.

She presses her hand to his stomach, his blood wetting her palm

_It’s too much._

“No, no, no,” she shakes her head, pressing on him as if she could piece him back together with her will and her hands.

He coughs, blood spilling from his lips as he leans on her.

“It’s no use,” he says, his tone resigned and nearly nonchalant.

“Stop that,” she hisses even though she knows he’s right. She can’t admit it, can’t let him slip away. He collapses into her arms and she bites back a sob, his strong body so weak in her arms seeming such a contradiction, “why did you do that? Why did you jump like that?”

“Don’t waste the little time left asking questions you know the answer to, Mikasa.”

It’s the closest thing from a declaration that will ever pass between the two of them and Mikasa’s chest tightens. She can feel it, his feelings for her met with her own for him. It’s agony, this feeling of need for another but it also soothes her.

“Please just...take me outside, I don’t want to be in here anymore.”

“Okay.”

It takes all of her strength to as she carries him outside, the night air a calming blanket on their skin. She carries him past Traute Carven’s body, over to the edge of the clearing and sits down with him on the soft grass. He rests his head in her lap. She runs a hand through his hair, pushing it to the side so she can see him. She wipes the blood from his mouth with the end of her shirt. His face is pale and his brow is sweating. The night is calm.

The world does not care that Levi is going to die.

It hits her then, like a bullet to her own heart that there’s nothing she can do besides hold him here. Tears roll down her cheeks silently as she looks upon his face. He wipes the tears from her cheek with a tenderness that seems odd from such a brutal man.

“It’s okay, don’t worry,” he says.

“You’re the only good thing I’ve ever had,” she whispers.

“At least we had it...it was all...it was a beautiful dream when everything else was shit,” he presses a kiss to the back of her hand and sighs, “I don’t regret any of it. None of it was a mistake because we chose this for ourselves, and that’s more than I can say for anything else I’ve ever done,” he smiles a little, “and I was right, I told you that we’d lie together beneath the stars.”

Her eyes widen. She remembers that night in the hotel room before she’d fallen asleep and she’d thought she’d imagined him saying that, dismissing it as something too poetic for Levi to voice.

“Tell me about Asia again,” he says through gritted teeth, the pain of his wound too much for him to keep entirely at bay. She wishes there was something she could do for his pain, but there’s only one kindness she could offer him and she thinks even she is not strong enough to do that. She’s too selfish to deny herself these last moments with him.

“We’ll live somewhere quiet, with no one else besides us. We’ll go on walks and follow wherever the trees lead us, stay out as long as we feel like. We’ll walk in the sun together...no more living underground, and we’ll wear robes with sashes around the waist like in the book,” her voice cracks but she makes herself continue, “and none of it will hurt anymore,” she whispers, equally to herself and to him.

A calm comes over Levi’s face as she speaks, her words gently guiding him from this world to whatever lies ahead.

He leans against her hand, his cool cheek in the palm of her hand before he goes still, his eyes unseeing as he looks up at her face.

With a trembling hand she closes his eyes. She looks at his face, runs her thumb over his still warm cheek and presses a kiss to his lips.

She hears pained, animal like sounds that she distantly notes are coming from her as she sobs and holds him to her. She doesn’t know how long she cries, but by the time she is finished she has nothing left inside of her, simply emptiness.

Mikasa doesn’t notice the Reiss family’s approach until they are right there before her.

“What happened up here??”

The Reiss siblings and their father look down upon her in horror, their expressions illuminated by lamps that they carry.

“It seems that there was a fight.”

Mikasa shivers. From the shadows emerges Historia Reiss, but she has changed from before. Mikasa can feel it in the air, the very same way she had before. On her face are three steaming hot lines, odd flesh wounds carved beneath her now cold, ancient eyes that Mikasa remembers from Frieda. Her voice is cold and distant when before it’d been warm and kind.

She is surrounded by the Reiss family the new Queen of the Walls in front of her. _This_ is the woman from her dreams, the woman who had set fire to the field.

“I cannot alter your memories as you are of the Ackerman family and the Asian bloodline,” Historia says plainly, her chin pointed proudly forward as she looks down upon her, “so to protect the Paradise I am chosen to create, you must swear your life to my cause.”

Mikasa thinks of her life. She thinks to her childhood and her parents being taken from her, of being used by whoever is in control.

Maybe the greatest power is to simply...stop.

She looks down at Levi again, his face calm and peaceful in death. She thinks of their shared legacy, the burden of their people passed down generation by generation until it was only them.

 _I am the last one. At least, the last inside of these walls._  

She looks at Historia Reiss, her cold blue eyes no longer striking fear into her but rather strengthening her resolve. She’s done being afraid.

“No.”

Her response is quiet but firm, her resolve unshakable and filling her with the freedom that she’s so desperately craved her entire life.

The queen nods solemnly, the answer neither anger her or pleasing her, simply information the same as anything else.

“As you wish. I am the queen of these walls, and while I am saddened by what has transpired between our people in the past, I must do what needs to be done to preserve this momentary Paradise I’ve created.”

There is a peacefulness to the queen that, even if odd, Mikasa finds soothing. She is certain in her actions the way that Mikasa is certain. It is her choice, the same as how she’d chosen Levi and he’d chosen her, and for that alone there’s nothing to regret.

Historia glances behind Mikasa, a wordless command to her father turned subject standing behind her.

Mikasa looks up at the night sky, the heavens that she’d dreamed of vast and limitless before her.

She hears the hammer of the gun fall into place behind her.

Maybe Levi was right, that this life they lived together was the dream all along.

The gun fires.

Mikasa wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes they both die, the ending line is metaphorical. Unfortunately that's been the end game since the beginning and the only way I feel this story could end with the themes I was trying to convey. Dying was the only way that they would be able to be free from their burdened lives, and the fact that they both made independent choices is what I wanted for them.
> 
> If you want to imagine a happier ending, pretend the Survey Corps bursts in with a titan Eren to devour Frieda the way that his father Grisha failed in this AU, and Levi and Mikasa join the survey corps instead. I really thought about this, but it contradicts their desire for freedom, rather they would just be trading one master for another, something that they both detested throughout this story.
> 
> I know it's sad, but I hope you all enjoyed it. I didn't reply to reviews the last few chapters because I didn't want to spoil things, but now I'll be happy to answer any questions. Thank you all so much for clinging on with me. This story was the most complex thing I've ever written and I have some mixed feelings about it, but overall I feel I've grown.
> 
> Thank you all again. See you all around!


End file.
